The Door Slams Shut — Chapter 1 of A Grief Observed and the First Silence of A Pleasant Fiction
This essay is the fourth in a series comparing and contrasting A Pleasant Fiction with C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. Coincidentally, at the time of this writing, both books sit together among the top twelve titles on Amazon’s Death & Grief bestseller list.
Every story of grief begins with disorientation. C. S. Lewis opens A Grief Observed in a panic: his faith has cracked and he can’t quite tell what remains. Javier De Lucia’s Calvin McShane begins A Pleasant Fiction in a similar fog — not theological panic, but existential confusion. Both men speak from the same hollow of first loss, where thought and language falter. But even here, at the threshold, the difference between them is already visible. Lewis hears the echo of a slamming door; Calvin hears only the hum of a quiet house.
I. “Where Is God?” — The Shock of Absence
The first line of A Grief Observed is an accusation. “Where is God?” Lewis asks. “Go to Him when your need is desperate … and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.”
Grief, for Lewis, is instantly personal and theological. The question is not simply Why did this happen? but Why did He let this happen to me? The collapse is relational — lover to Beloved, creature to Creator. He experiences divine silence as betrayal.
Calvin McShane opens A Pleasant Fiction from a quieter despair. His world is already godless, so there is no one left to accuse. “If I still believed in God,” he says, “I’d say He was cruel.” The subjunctive is everything. The door is not slammed; the house has long been empty. His bewilderment is not metaphysical but human: how to function, how to keep breathing, how to keep memory from turning toxic.
Where Lewis’s shock is that God seems gone, Calvin’s is that life goes on. The absence is the same, but the posture differs: one rattles the door, the other wanders the rooms.
II. Self-Consciousness and the Mirror of Pain
Midway through Chapter 1, Lewis notices that grief has turned him into a stranger to himself. “I see the image of a man in pain, but that’s all. I can’t feel for him.” He fears that sorrow has made him hollow, that his words about faith are now only noise. His analytical mind turns inward until it becomes self-devouring — the philosopher dissecting his own heartbeat.
Calvin feels that same split, but he treats it with humor. “I can’t walk and chew gum at the same time,” he says of himself early in A Pleasant Fiction. The self-deprecation masks the same anxiety: that grief has made him clumsy, detached, absurd. Both men are haunted by self-consciousness — the modern curse of seeing one’s own suffering from the outside.
The difference is tone. Lewis fears introspection will destroy his faith. Calvin accepts introspection as all that’s left. For Lewis, self-analysis is a symptom of doubt; for Calvin, it’s a survival strategy.
III. Writing as Survival
Lewis admits that he must write to stay sane. “By writing it all down,” he says, “I believe I get a little outside it.” He wonders whether this is healthy or self-indulgent, whether the act of analysis distances him from genuine feeling.
Calvin never apologizes for writing. In the final chapters of A Pleasant Fiction he recognizes that narration itself is the means of endurance — that by telling the story, he is preserving what otherwise would vanish. What Lewis fears might alienate him from love is, for Calvin, the only way to keep love alive.
This is where the two converge most closely and then part forever. Both discover that language is the only tool left after loss; but Lewis uses it to rebuild theology, while Calvin uses it to reconstruct memory. Lewis writes toward God; Calvin writes toward self-understanding.
IV. The Problem of Presence
Lewis’s early anguish revolves around the question of divine presence. “So present He seems at times in good fortune,” he complains, “so absent now.” His pain comes from the inconsistency: a God who once felt near now feels gone. His lament assumes a relationship betrayed.
Calvin would find that notion foreign. He does not recall a time when God felt near. For him, presence is human: the warmth of a hand, the echo of laughter, the persistence of memory. His losses — his parents, his brother, the unborn child — are felt as absences of people, not of providence.
Thus, Calvin’s grief is distributed; Lewis’s is centralized. One loses an entire metaphysical order; the other loses the fragile network of human meaning that made life worth living.
Both men are bereaved, but of different gods.
V. The Failure of Consolation
Lewis confesses that no religious comfort works. “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion.” His grief becomes a crisis of expectation: he feels God’s absence and can’t reconcile it with a faith built on the promise of presence. If God is real, why doesn’t He intervene?
Calvin reads that impulse almost as self-indulgence. His instinct is to rebuke it. So something terrible happened to you—now you doubt? Tragedy is everywhere, every day. If the suffering of others never shook your belief, why should your own loss suddenly make you wise? In his mind, that’s not faith failing; that’s ego speaking. He concedes that it’s a poor argument to reject God merely because pain touched you, but he adds that it’s just as empty to affirm God’s existence because others suffer more or because your own life, on balance, has been good. Both positions make belief a function of luck.
Where Lewis mourns divine absence as betrayal, Calvin exposes the narcissism hidden in that disappointment. Lewis’s lament implicitly assumes that God’s goodness should manifest as personal consolation—that divinity ought to answer human pain. Calvin’s disbelief runs deeper, because ought is trumped by is. Lewis can insist that God ought to answer, but even he concedes that God does not. Calvin takes that absence at face value.
VI. Two Silences
By the end of Chapter 1, Lewis’s tone softens. He begins to suspect that his anger might be part of the process, not a disproof of belief. The slammed door becomes, tentatively, a test. His question shifts from Where is God? to What is He trying to teach me?
Calvin never reopens that door. His apostasy is resignation, not defiance. The universe owes no explanation. What Lewis interprets as the hiddenness of God, Calvin experiences as the neutrality of nature. The silence, in both books, is absolute — but only Lewis insists it must belong to someone.
The result is two forms of faith:
Lewis’s faith in mystery.
Calvin’s faith through acceptance.
Both are acts of courage, but they travel in opposite directions.
VII. Continuity and Aftermath
When Chapter 1 of A Grief Observed closes, Lewis is still circling the question of divine love. He has not yet bargained or repented; he simply trembles in the void. A Pleasant Fiction opens in the same emotional register but different intellectual climate. Calvin is already post-theological; his project begins where Lewis’s will end.
The pairing of these openings reveals a subtle evolution: grief no longer needs God to be real. The raw human shock — the sense that “the sky has fallen inward” — is the same in both men. But Calvin no longer translates that shock into theology. He stays with the human texture of it, the taste of coffee gone bitter, the quieting of a once-full house. His first silence is not divine; it’s domestic.
VIII. Conclusion
Chapter 1 of A Grief Observed and the opening of A Pleasant Fiction are twin portraits of disorientation, drawn from different centuries of belief. Both capture the helpless first phase of mourning — when intellect, habit, and faith all fail. But the questions they ask set their trajectories apart.
Lewis begins with Where is God?
Calvin begins with What now?
Between those questions lies sixty years of cultural change — from faith’s struggle with silence to humanity’s attempt to live within it. One hears the door slam; the other stands in the empty room. Both listen. Only one expects an answer.
© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.
