C.S. Lewis Goes to Hell

So, just as Dante took a trip to hell, so did C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce. He may have even copied the idea from Dante seeing as how he studied medieval literature, including The Divine Comedy. However, their accounts are nothing alike. Dante's is all fire, pain, punishment, and misery. Lewis' is all dullness, mediocrioty, and misery. And if I remember correctly, purgatory and hell are the same place. It is only purgatory for the people who will eventually make it to heaven, but hell for those who will not. Dante's hell people merit it by works of evil, Lewis' hell people have merited it by denying the grace of God. The most interesting thing I find in The Great Divorce is that hell is infinitely small, being said to be contained in an atom of the Real World. And in the Real World, those of hell, or of purgatory realize that they are phantoms, and not solid, but they only realize this with comparison to the Real World. The people there are extremely solid looking, the rain hits the phantoms like bullets, and the flowers can't be picked by them because they are so strong. But I do not think either of them actually believe their depicitons as reality. They both go against scripture and/or add to scripture. I do not think they were meant to be believed in that kind of sense, only to spell out some kind of theological belief that only literature is able to. (Correct me if I'm wrong. It's been a while since I read Lewis.)