Great Literature
On Board the Dawn Treader
By Diane Pendergraft
“. . . A story worth reading only in childhood
is not worth reading even then.”—C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis wrote, “. . . A story worth reading only in child- hood is not worth reading even then.” In writing the kind
of stories he would have liked to read, he
succeeded in writing stories that adults
as well as children have been enjoying
for more than sixty years. One aspect of
Lewis’s brilliance was that he was able to
incorporate Christian themes into his
stories in such a way that non-Christians
often don’t notice them, yet are drawn to
the stories. The Narnia Chronicles may
certainly be read and enjoyed without
the reader’s noticing the Christian allusions. As with any work of literature,
however, an understanding of the author,
his worldview and, whenever possible,
what he said about his own work add
depth and meaning to the reading.
Before reading The Voyage of the Dawn
Treader, do some research about the
author. You may read as little as a short
biography on the Internet or read what
Lewis wrote about himself in Surprised
by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life.
Next, read what he said about his own
writing. Nine of his essays on writing
were published in a book called Of Other
Worlds. If you are unable to read all of the
essays, start with “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said” and
“It All Began With a Picture . . . .” These
essays are available on the Internet.
Lewis once warned that, when criticiz-
ing a book, if you “start explaining how
it came to be like that . . . you will nearly
always be wrong.” A prevalent assump-
tion about the Narnia stories that often
causes confusion is that Lewis intended
them to be allegories. An allegory is a
literary device in which the characters
and events symbolize ideas or moral or
religious concepts. Lewis denied that his
stories were intended as allegories. He
wrote: “You are mistaken when you think
that everything in the books ‘represents’
something in this world. Things do that
in The Pilgrims’ Progress but I’m not wri-
ting in that way.” Lewis said that this was
his perspective: “Suppose there were a
world like Narnia and it needed rescuing
and the Son of God . . . went to redeem it,
as He came to redeem ours, what might
it, in that world, all have been like?”
However, many characters and events
are allusions to real life or literature. An
allusion is an indirect but meaningful or
pointed reference. As a professor of Me-
dieval and Renaissance English, Lewis
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