Introduction

The Chronicles of Narnia are, at present, the best-known and most influential works of a well-known and very influential writer. They outsell the rest of C. S. Lewis’s works combined, at a rate now of several hundred thousand volumes per year. Regarded as classics by many authorities on children’s literature, they are read and loved also by college students and other adults. And their popularity is probably not just a passing thing. “If asked which of Lewis’s books I thought most likely to become immortals,” Walter Hooper wrote a few years ago, “I should say the ‘Narnian Chronicles.’”¹ Despite their sales and popularity, however, there seems to be a good deal of uncertainty about how the books should be read and understood—it is reflected in the questions some people raise about the books and in the articles other people write in reply.

Such uncertainty appears most directly in the question frequently asked about details in the Chronicles, “What does this stand for?” That the question is asked indicated that the stories are not being approached as stories which are complete in themselves, but as works dependent in outside information for full meaning. Some people, [ß p. xi] therefore, refer to the stories as “allegories.” If they mean by “allegory” only that the stories have more than one level of meaning, a religious significance beyond their plots, once cannot object: the tales do have theme, and sometimes, several themes. If in referring to the Chronicles, however, they use “allegory” to mean an “extended metaphor in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative . . . are equated with meanings that lie outside the narrative itself,”² to mean, in other words, that the reader is always to be asking what this or that “symbolizes,” then I at least must demur. To view them so misses Lewis’s main intent and runs the danger of distorting their artistry and detracting from their universal meanings as fairy tales.

In the essays which follow I will give a reading of the Chronicles, which, I believe, clarifies and enhances their intent and techniques, while avoiding the problems an “allegorical” approach raises. I will outline and then apply to the Chronicles a critical approach consistent with Lewis’s idea about “pure story.”³ I will suggest that Lewis created in his stories “secondary worlds” which he expected readers to enter imaginatively and to respond to, initially, with their hearts, rather than with their heads. For such an approach, the sources of Lewis’s ideas, the influences upon his techniques, the history of the forms in which he worked, and the similarities of his other works to the Chronicles are of little importance. The emphasis will be on the stories themselves, starting with what Lewis once called “the genuinely critical question ‘Why, and how should we read this?’”⁴ For that reason, I do not for the most part, include explanatory references from other essays or books by Lewis: they should not be needed and might encourage readers to intellectualize the Chronicles, rather than enter them imaginatively.

There is one major exception to that, however. I have referred frequently to Mere Christianity, not because its explanations are necessary to make Narnia meaningful, [ß p. xii] but because of what seems to me a special imaginative relationship between it and the images and stories of Narnia. Mere Christianity was published in 1952. At some point during the time he was writing the Chronicles (between 1949 and 1953) Lewis revised the three separate volumes of BBC talks into a single volume, making additions and deletions, rephrasing sentences, expending the contractions, and eliminating the use of italics for emphasis.⁵ Thus, Mere Christianity, was fresh in Lewis’s mind during the period in which he was writing the Chronicles and that might account, in part at least, for the numerous parallels in imagery and word choice between it and various Chronicles. Those parallels, in several instances, seem to be central to the plot or structure of the stories and to have a significance far beyond clarification of a particular idea or doctrine in the stories.

For a similar reason I have rarely used Bible texts to illustrate or clarify meanings in the story.⁶ To look for Biblical parallels or illustrations implies that the Chronicles are dependent on biblical glosses for fullest clarity and effectiveness, rather than being self-sufficient and containing their won meanings. And only rarely, when they are of special importance, have I pointed out biblical allusions, or brief, passing verbal echoings of the Bible. At times readers who know the Bible well will find phrases or situations in the Chronicles which remind them of Biblical phrases or situations. But the recognition of the allusions should be almost automatic, a tidbit which enriches the experience for the reader alert or knowledgeable enough to notice. The effect is spoiled of the allusion must be pointed out or explained. For me to mention them regularly might suggest that the books are meant especially for the informed, for those who recognize such references. That, I firmly believe, is not the case. [ß p. xiii].

The key to the approach of this book, then, is that it assumes the Chronicles are not dependent on works or ideas outside of themselves, either through allegory or allusion. They depict secondary worlds, separate and self-contained, and they are to be “received” as such, through the imagination and the emotions. My goal in this study, therefore, is to send readers back to the Chronicles with interest renewed and enjoyment increased; to bring out the universal character of the stories by focusing on archetypal motifs, characters and images; and to clarify the broad patterns of Christian meaning—not picky parallels--which Lewis develops within the books. [ß p. xiv]