Heaven Imagery
Chapter X of The Problem of Pain is primarily concerned with heaven. Lewis describes heaven beautifully, full of similes and figurative phrasing that attempts to capture a sense of the beauty of heaven. One such example is that heaven is "the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work" (95). Such imagery fills the last chapter of the book as Lewis transitions to pondering the sufferings of this world to contemplating the glories of the next.
Hell Imagery
Chapter VIII, by contrast, is devoted to Hell, the state of existence after death in which humanity is separated from God. There is plenty of imagery here to emphasize the severity of Hell, with adjectives such as "intolerable" and "nightmarish." Lewis argues that Hell is a terrible necessity, but a necessity nonetheless, and in this book he attempts to persuade the reader that Hell is a looming reality and that Heaven is its superior in every sense, trying to push the reader to the contemplation of God.
Pain Imagery
This book is primarily concerned with addressing the so-called "problem of pain," and Lewis doesn't shy away from using affecting imagery to emphasize the severity and reality of suffering in this world: "When I think of pain — of anxiety that gnaws like fire and loneliness that spreads out like a desert, and the heart-breaking routine of monotonous misery, or again of dull aches that blacken our whole landscape or sudden nauseating pains that knock a man’s heart out at one blow, of pains that seem already intolerable and then are suddenly increased, of infuriating scorpion-stinging pains that startle into maniacal movement a man who seemed half dead with his previous tortures — it 'quite o’ercrows my spirit'" (65). By using such imagery throughout the book, Lewis demonstrates that he isn't simply another theoretical philosopher justifying pain as an abstract concept, but one who genuinely knows the impact these arguments have on real, everyday life.
Human Finitude Imagery
Throughout the book, Lewis also uses several analogies to emphasize his point that the limitations of the human mind are skewing the way we understand the problem and view God's actions in light of it. For example, he compares God's understanding of true morality in relation to ours to a perfect circle and a child's first attempt at drawing one. Other such images flood the book; humans are compared to the work of an artist, the child of a Father, and a person who wants to abolish noses altogether because he smells bad. The result of all this imagery is the realization that humans aren't the center of the universe, and that there is Someone greater in all respects to whom we should defer our value and moral judgments.
