Did you notice...

Tsukiko

Tsukiko

Active member
Seeing as I am currently reading The Silver Chair right now, I noticed that Lewis throughout the whole book practicaly calls Eustace "Scrubb." and Jill "Jill" instead of "Pole."

Even when Eustace speaks he's Scrubb: "Dont be such a wet blanket." said Scrubb. but if Jill "Dont be such a wet blanket." said Jill.

I just wondered why Lewis never really wrote it by calling her Pole as much as he calls Eustace, Scrubb. Except, Puddle and Eustace call her Pole a lot I think.
 
Im sure that is not the case. Maybe Lewis got caught up on calling Eustace, Scrubb, and Jill, Jill, instead of Pole.

Call me stupid for making such a thread as this. Though I always do wonder upon the smallest things.
 
TrueNarnianForever said:
Seeing as I am currently reading The Silver Chair right now, I noticed that Lewis throughout the whole book practicaly calls Eustace "Scrubb." and Jill "Jill" instead of "Pole."

Even when Eustace speaks he's Scrubb: "Dont be such a wet blanket." said Scrubb. but if Jill "Dont be such a wet blanket." said Jill.

I just wondered why Lewis never really wrote it by calling her Pole as much as he calls Eustace, Scrubb. Except, Puddle and Eustace call her Pole a lot I think.
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I didn't like that.............
 
Well, I suppose Lewis is not being rude by calling him Scrubb and her Jill instead of Pole. Or if you mean the Puddleglum matter, the uhh..Wet Blanket. ;)
 
I think it sounds more... I don't know that time, calling Jill "Jill" and not by her last name. But Eustace, it makes more sence. It just shows respect.

That's my opinion, though.
 
Hhmm..well, I noticed that when Jill and Eustace shake hands towards the end, and they say, "Goodbye Jill." and "Goodbye Eustace." and it said that that was the first time they used Christian names.

Now, after that, then Lewis starts calling Scrubb, Eustace and throughout the rest of the book.
 
I wonder if it has to do with the fact that Jill was the one given the task by Aslan. It wasn't until they actually apologized to each other for their own shortcomings/transgressions against each other that they used their first names.

It was basically a complete rejection of Experiment House rules at a time when they thought they were most certainly going to die. A friendship forged in Narnia following Aslan's orders.

MrBob
 
I believe the answer to this question goes back to the very beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
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I think C.S. Lewis intentionally picked a name for Eustace which he himself didn't like in order to show the reader that this kid was a real stinker. In The Silver Chair, Eustace has changed from the boy he used to be. He is no longer the little brat we read about in Voyage. So in a sense he gets a name change to go along with his change of heart. Eustace is the little so and so we read about in VDT. Scrubb on the other hand is one of the three heroes in SC.

I think Lewis went to calling him Scrubb because he felt no one deserves the name Eustace Clarence :p
 
I actually have a grandfather and an uncle named Eustace. :D I grew up with that, so I never realized what an awful name it was until I read the Chronicles. :p Even so, I can't dislike it as much as other people, because it's so familiar to me.

It really bothered me that the characters were referred to as "Scrubb" and "Pole" in TSC. I would have preferred it if they had used their proper names.
 
Well yeah, see you run into problems anytime you have to present an opinion as factl I wasn't saying Eustace was a really bad name. But apparnently this is the idea Lewis wants us to get from the books as that is how he starts VDT. Some people may like the name, some may dislike it, some may HAVE that name. But for the purpose of the story, the reader is supposed to view it as a bad name.

Kinda like in the movies where RD and LotGK and WW are supposed to be really beautiful, but the filmmakers have to cast a human actress and therefore we veiwers may or may not think the actress is beautiful. But it is understood that they are supposed to be beautiful whether we think they are or not.
 
I really think it has a lot to do with the part you (Tsukiko) brought up about them only calling each other by their Christian names at that one time, and after that it changes. It's a part of the character development.
 
This is a question that I have wondered about also. Eustace is never referred to as Scrubb in VDT, but that changes in SC and LB. I do think that Scubb and Pole are the bad names to Lewis. But why inject this into the story?
 
Tsukiko said:
Seeing as I am currently reading The Silver Chair right now, I noticed that Lewis throughout the whole book practicaly calls Eustace "Scrubb." and Jill "Jill" instead of "Pole."

Even when Eustace speaks he's Scrubb: "Dont be such a wet blanket." said Scrubb. but if Jill "Dont be such a wet blanket." said Jill.

I just wondered why Lewis never really wrote it by calling her Pole as much as he calls Eustace, Scrubb. Except, Puddle and Eustace call her Pole a lot I think.
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I think that, historically, in boarding schools and a lot of private schools it was pretty common for male students to be referred to by their peers and by their teachers by their last names rather than their first names, so Eustace would probably have been called and thought of by his classmates as Scrubb unless they were his friends. Then they might have called him Eustace, as Jill eventually came to do, but at the beginning of SC, I definitely had the impression that Eustace didn't have a lot of friends and Jill certainly wasn't among them.

Lewis might have felt like this was a kind of masculine way to write about a girl, so he might have chosen to refer to Jill by her first name in the narration, but perhaps Puddlegum and Eustace, wanting to treat her as an equal (or "as one of the guys", you might say), called her Pole at first to mimic the way males who weren't close friends might address one another.

I don't necessarily think that it is meant to be a snub to just call someone, especially a male, by their last name. There are quite a few subcultures, like the athletic, where it is respectful and even affectionate to just call your friends or teammates by their last names. A lot of guys that I know are called by their last names or a nickname based off their last name by their friends, and they really like it. So, I think it is, in general, more customary for guys to just get called by their last name than it is for girls, and that might have been why Lewis was comfortable referring to Eustace as Scrubb but Jill as Jill.

I also think that the story was written more from Jill's perspective than from Eustace's, so she is more likely to think of herself as Jill and Eustace as Scrubb at least until she knows him better.

Those are just a couple of my theories. Hope they are interesting or helpful:D
 
Just the point I was going to make, Sunshine Rose, but you beat me to it by a few hours! When I was at secondary school, the teachers and prefects nearly always addressed me, and the other boys, by their surnames but the girls were called 'Miss X' or 'Miss Y'. As you rightly observe, even the boys themselves addressed each other thus: Christian names were only used amongst friends. I think this explains why Eustace was nearly always referred to as 'Scrubb': it is something he and Jill would have taken for granted. In my class, there were two cousins with the same surname, which made things interesting! They were often called by their Christian names, Clive and Colin. One teacher solved the problem by nicknaming them Fred and Joe! Presumably that is why, in the case of Peter and Edmund, the author used their Christian names: to do otherwise would have resulted in no end of confusion!
 
CORIN THUNDERFIST II said:
Just the point I was going to make, Sunshine Rose, but you beat me to it by a few hours! When I was at secondary school, the teachers and prefects nearly always addressed me, and the other boys, by their surnames but the girls were called 'Miss X' or 'Miss Y'. As you rightly observe, even the boys themselves addressed each other thus: Christian names were only used amongst friends. I think this explains why Eustace was nearly always referred to as 'Scrubb': it is something he and Jill would have taken for granted. In my class, there were two cousins with the same surname, which made things interesting! They were often called by their Christian names, Clive and Colin. One teacher solved the problem by nicknaming them Fred and Joe! Presumably that is why, in the case of Peter and Edmund, the author used their Christian names: to do otherwise would have resulted in no end of confusion!
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Good to know that I was not off base:D
 
When I was in High School, true many people referred to me in my surname and I did the same to other male friends, but I never called a girl by her surname. And why continue to do it in the LB? By that time the two were close friends, comrades in Aslan.
 
It was the way Lewis was brought up, a time when you were called by your surname and you called your father Sir. Lewis's own life is woven in to his works and he drew apon it alot hence the calling people by their surnames rather than their christian ones.
 
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