By the time Luke appears in the New Testament, the Bible has already said over and over that the dead are unconscious or not existent at this time, though for them, even millions of years without conscious perception would seem like an instant because their next experience would be at their resurrection (this is how Paul's idea of Christians going immediately to Christ's presence after death in Philippians 1:23-24 does not contradict soul sleep). Sheol is where all people, the righteous and wicked alike, are said to go according to Ecclesiastes 9:10, Job 3:11-19, and many individual examples of people of either moral alignment across the Bible. Sheol is also the same as the Hades of the New Testament. Compare Psalm 16:10 with Acts 2:27 for an example of how the latter references the former by using Hades as a substitute for the word Sheol in another language. All of this and the affirmations of other verses (and what would logically follow from them if true) mark the philosophical context in which Jesus uses the word Hades, speaking of the afterlife abode of a selfish rich man in what is ultimately a story used to make separate points.
The narrative Jesus tells in Luke 16:19-31 is as follows. A rich man living in daily luxury is contrasted with a poor man called Lazarus living by the former's gates, hoping to eat the scraps of food from the rich man's bounty (16:19-21). Both of them die around the same time, angels carrying Lazarus to be beside Abraham's spirit and the rich man going to Hades (16:22-23). As generally non-descriptive as the text is about the latter's torment, it is said to involve flames, and he asks Abraham, whom he sees far away (16:23), to send Lazarus with a fingertip's worth of water to be placed on his tongue (16:24). Abraham says that a great gulf keeps people on either side of this divide so that they cannot cross over (16:26). In response, the rich man begs Abraham to send Lazarus back to his five living brothers to warn them so that they will not also wind up in this agonizing afterlife (16:27-28, 30). However, Abraham insists that not even a resurrection of the dead will rouse someone who does not care about the theological revelation of "Moses and the Prophets" (16:31).
Luke 16 as a whole is about the ethics and use of money, starting with the parable of the shrewd manager (16:1-13), moving on to how God despises greed (16:14-15), and eventually reaching the story of the rich man and Lazarus. Both the parable of the shrewd manager and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus start with the exact same words of "'There was a rich man . . .'" to set up their respective stories. Yes, this singular account of Hades being a place of torment for the wicked between now and the grand judgment of Revelation 20 is a parable that begins in the same way as the one at the start of the chapter. There are three things that clarify how this is not the Biblical teaching on an afterlife waiting for the unsaved before the lake of fire, which God will use to consume the wicked until their bodies are ashes (2 Peter 2:6) and their spirits are forever dead (Ezekiel 18:4, Romans 6:23).
The first is, as each entry in this series has explored, that the unsaved dead are directly presented as having no conscious experience until resurrected, with the righteous either being granted a special, unclarified exception to this at some point or simply awakening at their own resurrection as if only a moment has passed since their death (Philippians 1:23-24). This is clarified well before the gospels, and even accounts within the gospels, like Mark 5:35-40 and John 11:11-13, call death like literal sleep and show Jesus get misunderstood by people on this. Dead humans are said to be asleep or nonexistent many times over. The second indicator that this is a parable is the aforementioned way that it opens with identical phrasing to the parable of the shrewd manager that ends only a few verses before. The third is that Abraham states that the resurrection of a dead person is useless if someone neglects the philosophy of the Torah and prophetic writings of the Bible. Now, it is indeed true that even the metaphysically intrinsic, epistemologically self-evident truth of logical axioms can be denied or ignored by an irrational person, and so of course a sensory perception of a resurrected person, the accuracy of which is neither self-evident nor true by necessity (and thus not knowable beyond what is possible or what seems to be the case), can be casually dismissed by irrational people.
Even so, the resurrection of Jesus, which would have happened either way for soteriological reasons, is treated by the Bible as strong outward evidence of his divine status. When Jesus resurrects the other Lazarus of John 11 before his own death and restoration to life that foreshadows ours, moreover, John says that many Jews reacted to this miracle by committing to him (11:43-45). A perceived resurrection could be an illusion of the mind and its senses like the vast majority of other sensory experiences (though the mental perception exists by necessity as long as it is experienced), meaning no fully rational person would believe that it is actually real as opposed to possible and likely, but only in the same way that they would not believe the chair they are sitting on really is a chair, although it might be and appears to be. The historically probable resurrection of Jesus and others is certainly significant evidence for Christianity, and this is of major relevance to committing to Christ on any level.
It is possible for someone to ignore all logical proof of or probabilistic evidence for a respective thing, yes. It is also possible for something as dramatic or existentially charged as resurrection to shake someone from philosophical apathy so that they become concerned with understanding and living for the truth, or every truth that is verifiable by beings with human limitations at least (which would include the fact that evidential probabilities are likely). The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is not ultimately to reveal what awaits people after death now or at any point in human history. Elsewhere, in emphasizing the unconsciousness of the dead in the grave, the Bible has already elaborated upon what the real nature of Sheol, synonymous with Hades, is, and it is not a realm where there is human consciousness at all. The context of the parable is one condemning greed, one pointing out that materialistic selfishness and the neglect of truth, one's fellow humans, and the obligations rooted in the divine nature separates people from God. There is otherwise only the blatantly figurative language of Isaiah 14:8-11 speaking of trees and departed spirits alike celebrating the fall of a Babylonian ruler to "suggest" that Sheol/Hades is experienced by any of the dead. The Biblical position is that the minds of the dead perceive nothing (again, Ecclesiastes 9:5-10), suspended in a dreamless sleep or perhaps totally dispelled from existence until they are revived by God for the cosmic fates of eternal life or the full annihilation of the soul (John 3:16).
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