Originally Posted by martureo

It's an allegory. The narrator (Lewis) has a dream where he is in a gloomy town in an eternal twilight. He queues with others to board a "bus" because he doesn't know what else to do. This bus rises into the air and after some time arrives in a splendid country. He soon realizes that he and everyone else who arrived on the bus are actually dead. The country in which they arrive is a plain at the base of some mountains, sunny, teeming with life.

But since the dead are really just "dirty" ghosts they cannot effect anything in the country. The grass hurts the feet, apples cannot be picked and rain seems like a frightening affair.

Bright spirits talk to the ghosts about the affairs of their lives on earth and try to get them to journey into the mountains. Many turn around and refuse for various reasons, mostly because they cannot have things the way they wish to have them, and return to the "town." The observation is made by Lewis in the dream to a bright spirit escorting him that the choices made are not new choices but the sum of the choices already made in the life of the person


While this is a somewhat heterodox view in its presentation (especially to Fundamentalists) I have no problem whatsoever repeating that no one is in Hell that doesn't want to be.