The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe Analysis

The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.' – S.C. Lewis (1961)

The Chronicles of Narnia were written in the 1950s by Clive Staples Lewis. An atheist from boyhood, he converted to Christianity when he was a high-powered professor at Oxford, at the age of 33 (Wilson, 1990). C.S. Lewis, perhaps, the 20th Century’s most famous convert to Christianity has then devoted the rest of his life to writing about faith. Undoubtedly, The Narnia Chronicles are his most popular works.

In this essay I will analyse the first out of seven novels ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ and the sixth novel ‘The Magician’s Nephew’. I will argue that religion and literature spring

And just as Adam was the first to bring sin into the world, Digory brought evil into the world of Narnia.

In the creating story in Genesis, Adam and Eve broke the ‘rules’ by refusing to obey commands of an authoritative figure, God. (Gen 2-3) The second ‘evil’ element could be found in the character of the serpent. Just as The Witch in the ‘Magician’s Nephew’ can perhaps be seen as an image of the introduction of sin. The sin in the book was first presented within the theme of temptation that has a direct correlation with the stories and characters from the Bible. For example, in Chapter 13, Lewis is retelling the story of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The chapter (Lewis, 1988) sets the scene in the Garden of Eden (Gen 2-3) where Digory is looking after a silver apple for Aslan. The similarities here are

Lewis was bothered by good, evil and suffering in the world. And according to his letters (Lewis and Hooper, 2004) this perception of the world did not fit with whom he imagined God to be. Instead he found evil and suffering as an argument against Christianity, God and atheism. “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. Just how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?...Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist- in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless – I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality – namely my idea of justice – was full on sense.. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning (Lewis,