Young Writers Society

Evangelina wrote:Does everyone know that C.S. Lewis was a Christian and wrote this books, like Aslan was god or Jesus or something..I read an entire report but it seems to have slipped my mind. He was great friends with Tolkein, too.

Lewis, an expert on the subject of allegory, maintained that the books were not allegory, and preferred to call the Christian aspects of them "suppositional". This is similar to what we would now call fictional parallel universes. As Lewis wrote in a letter to a Mrs Hook in December of 1958:

“If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [a character in The Pilgrim's Progress] represents despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality, however, he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia, and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’ This is not allegory at all” (Martindale & Root 1990).

The Narnia series is not an allegory, because allegories have an overarching figurative level of meaning tied to the literal level, and the Narnia series has a literal level of meaning without any overarching figurative level, though there are figurative elements. The misconception that the Narnia series is an allegory is the result of the disjunction caused by the narrative taking place across parallel universes[citation needed]. There are similarities between the world of Narnia and our own, but these are literal manifestations of the same phenomena in multiple worlds, not allegorical abstractions. For example, the character Aslan is not an allegorical representation of Christ, but a literal representation of Christ only in another body, in another universe, and by another name. Aslan and Jesus are the same character in two different worlds. There is no allegory involved. As Lewis has Aslan say at the end of Dawn Treader, "There I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name."