Puzzle

Puzzle is the donkey in The Last Battle who is forced into one of the saddest roles in the Chronicles. He is not wicked. He is timid, simple, and painfully easy for Shift to dominate. When the ape finds a lion skin and decides to use it for a fraud, Puzzle becomes the creature stuffed into the costume and pushed into the darkness to impersonate Aslan.

Lewis does not write Puzzle as a willing conspirator in the same sense as Shift. Puzzle knows enough to be miserable, ashamed, and frightened, but he does not have the confidence or clarity to break away quickly. He is the sort of character who can be talked into terrible things by someone stronger-willed and more ruthless. That makes him frustrating at times, but it also makes him pitiable. His weakness is moral weakness, yes, but it is also the weakness of a creature who has been cowed into obedience.

As the deception grows, Puzzle becomes more and more broken by it. He suffers physically in the lion skin and emotionally under the weight of pretending to be what he is not. One of the reasons The Last Battle lands so hard is that the false Aslan plot is not built only on malice. It is also built on the suffering of someone too weak to resist properly. Puzzle shows how evil often works through the frightened and confused, not only through the openly cruel.

In the end, Puzzle helps expose the lie because the burden becomes too much to carry. His role in the story gives the book some of its grief and some of its mercy. Lewis does not present him as admirable in the heroic sense, but he does present him as a warning and a sorrow. Puzzle is what happens when goodness without firmness meets manipulation without conscience.

That makes him more important than his humble appearance suggests. He is central to the final crisis of Narnia, and he gives the book one of its clearest pictures of innocence being misused.