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The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
Background Information and Discussion Questions for November 3, 2015
Discussion will focus on Chapters One through Five.
Please note that some of the background information and many of the discussion questions are taken from “Study Guide for C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, cached at cfile4.uf.tistory.com. If you want to read the entire 45 page guide, see me for more information.
Background Information:
Why write a children’s story?
In an article titled On Children’s Stories, published in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, Lewis stated “No book is really worth reading at the age of 10 which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty . . . The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.” He identified three ways of writing for children:
· Writing what the author thinks the child likes or needs. This often fails because what the author assumes differs from what the child really likes or needs.
· Writing a story that had been told to a particular child orally. This often fails because the child’s presence and reactions will shape the story. The story may be enjoyed on one occasion by one child, but not be of general interest.
· Writing a children’s story because a children’s story is the best “art-form” for something you have to say. He concluded this was the only valid reason, and the only approach that results in a story that children will want to hear again and again.
As you read this story, keep in mind that Lewis was writing this book at the same time that he was composing the essays that became the book Mere Christianity. For those of you who participated in our book group study of Mere Christianity, watch for themes that have found their way into this book. According to the Study Guide:
“Some people think that the reason he turned to writing for children was that his attempts to argue for Christian faith rationally weren’t working as well as he’d hoped, and so he decided he needed a different approach, an approach that would touch people’s hearts more than their heads.”
Lewis described the potential in using fantasy to communicate the Christian message in the following way:
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. [Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 47.]
How did Lewis write a children’s story?
Lewis described his writing process as starting with pictures in his head.
I have never exactly ‘made’ a story. With me the process is much more like birdwatching than like either talking or building. I see pictures. Some of these pictures have a common flavour, almost a common smell, which groups them together. Keep quiet and watch and they will begin joining themselves up. If you were very lucky (I have never been as lucky as all that) a whole set might join themselves so consistently that there you had a complete story; without doing anything yourself. But more often (in my experience always) there are gaps. Then at last you have to do some deliberate inventing, have to contrive reasons why these characters should
be in these various places doing these various things. I have no idea whether that is the usual way of writing stories, still less whether it is the best. It is the only one I know: images always come first. (On Writing for Children)
For The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe , Lewis has shared his “first picture”:
The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.’
An illustrator, Pauline Baynes, worked closely with Lewis to translate the pictures in his head into illustrations for the book. If your copy lacks these illustrations, ask to look at them in another book group member’s copy.
The story is dedicated to Lucy, who is the daughter of a close friend of C.S. Lewis. It is sent in 1940. At that time during World War II, children were evacuated from London, and sent to live with couples outside London to protect them from the bombings. C. S. Lewis provided a home for some of these children.
Questions for Discussion:
1. Think about the way each of the children are presented in chapter One. What do you learn about their personalities and the family dynamics? With which of the four do you identify by the end of Chapter one? Do you identify with the same child by the end of Chapter Five?
2. Lots of children’s stories include some sort of a door from this world into another world. What other children’s stories can you think of like this?
3. In Chapter two, people from our world are referred to as “Sons of Adam” and “Daughters of Eve.” For Lewis, these are both a title of great honor and of great shame. Why would it be both?
4. Throughout the book, we learn about the characters by the kind of homes in which they live. What have we learned about Mr. Tumnus?
5. Note in Chapter 2 that as Mr. Tumnus performs for Lucy, she wants to “cry and laugh and dance and go to sleep all at the same time.” Lewis attempts to capture this feeling state with the term “joy” or “longing.” Lewis wrote about this feeling in a number of books, claiming that when we feel such longing or joy, we are really wanting Heaven. In Mere Christianity, he describes two “wrong ways” and one “right way” to respond to these feelings. The “right way” is summarized below:
The Christian says, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.” Mere Christianity, Book III, chapter 10.
Do you agree with Lewis that in moments of joy and longing, we are really wanting Heaven?
6. What is the significance of the fact that in Narnia it’s “always winter and never Christmas?”
7. In Chapter 3, why do you think Lucy becomes upset when people don’t believe her? Is there a parallel between her experience in attempting to describe Narnia and your experience in attempting to share your experience as a Christian with others?
8. What Christian themes emerge in the story of Edward’s experience with the White Witch and Turkish Delight?
9. By the end of Chapter 4, Lucy and Edmund seem to be on different sides of the conflict in Narnia. If Edmund had met Mr. Tumnus first, and Lucy had met the Queen first, would they have been on opposite sides? Which side would you have been on?
10. In chapter 5, Peter and Susan learn of Lucy’s experience. While having trouble believing it, they also have trouble dismissing it. It has been suggested that the problem they have in believing Lucy’s account is exactly the same sort of problem that many people have with believing the Christian gospel. The problem is created by the assumptions that people bring to their investigation of the “evidence.” What assumptions get in the way of believing the Christian message? Hint: To answer this question, look carefully at the logic offered by the Professor.