The Chronicles of Narnia

The Fiction of C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963)

Reepicheep

“When I was ten, I read fairy stories in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” -- C. S. Lewis

“…unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

– Matthew 18:3

Childish? Or Childlike?

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950)

Entrance to Narnia

Enter Temptation: Eustace and the White Witch

The White Witch cites “the Law:”“…every traitor belongs to me as my lawful prey and for every treachery I have a right to kill” (The Lion, p. 155)

“But, if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” (1 John 2:1-2)

Deep Magic vs. “a deeper magic still”

“Recovery, in Tolkien’s sense of the term, is a key to the Chronicles as fairy tales. The stories take readers out of the Primary World and allow them to experience a Secondary World that changes their outlook, so that as they re-enter the Primary World, they see new things in it and see old things in fresh ways.” (Peter J. Schakel, 116)

Why fairy tales “work”:

Narnia

Lewis is not preaching or being didactic… “Rather, the stories present proper behavior and values objectively, as something readers already know perfectly well. They do not instruct, they remind, thus following a maxim of Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century moralist whom Lewis admired greatly: ‘Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.’” (Peter J. Schakel, p. 117)

On “preachiness”:

Prince Caspian (1951)

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

The “Un-dragoning” of Eustace

Dufflepuds become visible

A journey to the end of the world…

The Silver Chair (1953)

The Horse and His Boy (1954)

The Magician’s Nephew (1955)

Fledge, carrying Digory and Polly

The Last Battle (1956)

Tash

Through the Stable Door

Lewis tells the story of a boy born in prison with his mother, who describes the outside world through drawings:

“On the whole [the boy] gets on tolerably well until, one day, he says something that gives his mother pause. For a minute or two they are at cross-

purposes. Finally it dawns on her that he has, all these years, lived under a misconception. ‘But,’

she gasps, ‘you didn’t think that the real world was full of lines drawn in lead pencil?’ ‘What?’ says the boy. ‘No pencil-marks there?’ And instantly his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank….” - C. S. Lewis, “Transposition”

This world is just a copy of the Real

“The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”

(The Last Battle, p. 228)“All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.” (The Last Battle, p. 228)

Heaven is a wonderful place

The words of Jewel the Unicorn: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Come further up, come further in!”

(The Last Battle, p. 213)

Heaven is Home

“I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices, almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.” – C. S. Lewis

“Watchful dragons”

How best to read The Chronicles

The Old Order: The Lion, the Witch and the WardrobePrince CaspianThe Voyage of the Dawn TreaderThe Silver ChairThe Horse and His BoyThe Magician’s NephewThe Last Battle 

The New Order:The Magician’s NephewThe Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe The Horse and His BoyPrince Caspian The Voyage of the Dawn TreaderThe Silver ChairThe Last Battle

“Further up and further in!”