Does Susan go to the "New Narnia"?/Whatever happened to Susan?

iMerge with a few older threads on this subject.

CSL said there was plenty of time for Susuan to regain her path, and so I believe she did.
:)
 
I agree with Mr. Lewis that there was plenty of time for Susan to turn back, but at the time of the train wreck she had lost everything - parents, siblings, cousin Eustice and Jill. All gone just like that. As a pastor I have seen a number of people who have lost loved ones. Most, with the Lord's help kept their faith intact. However, when dealing with those who had lost two or more loved ones due to a traffic accident, fire, tornadoes, etc., the loss was just too much for some of them to handle and they lost their way, at least temporarily. Some came back to God, but others lost themselves to drugs, alcohol, or severe mental problems and had to be institutionalized.

Susan was the logical one. The pragmatist of the group and perhaps that strength of character in her enabled her to get through this most difficult time in her young life.
 
I'm going to move this to "The Last Battle" Section, as it is more suited there.

iMove to "The Last Battle" Section.
 
Here's the skinny on Susan Inkspot. Susan went with her family in VDT for what was supposed to be a 16 week time while their dad had a job to teach or lecture. She wasn't moving to America for good. They hoped that Susan would have a good experience and thought it would be a good trip for her since they had expectations that she'd marry rather than have a job.

Come time for the Last Battle there's no reason that Susan wouldn't have been in England. The parents were. My guess would be that when the Professor put out the call for the friends of Narnia to come together...Susan probably had better things to do...like go to parties and other social events, go shopping, and be "grown up."

I would hope that she would become a friend of Narnia again at some point. Sufficed to say, she would have had the wake up call she needed when she heard about the train wreck. However, as sad and tragic as the ending of LB is for her, it mirrors reality. We can't make choices for others. People who aren't saved are people who are loved to. They're someone's sister or brother, daughter or son, friend, at times spouse...it's the way the world works and LB is a great reminder of that.
 
iMerge with an older thread on this subject. Yah, I was mistaken about Su being in America at time of TLB, that was during VDT.

I feel she did eventually return to Aslan as a Friend of Narnia ...
:)
 
Interesting...it's been 17 years since I'd read The Last Battle, and I'd forgotten this plot point. And to think I've been stressing that Adamson hadn't shot footage for the ending of The Last Battle while the actors are still children!
 
Welcome, Monster. I did not see you post before. The kids are all grown up in TLB of course. The question is whether Susan eventually comes back to Narnia. I think she does, and I think there's good ground for a fan fic all about it.
:)
 
as much as i would like her too, i'm not sure that susan does get back on the right track. In most of the Narnia books ahve some sort of an allegory to them,a nd I think Lewis may have intended susan to represent those who get of the right track and don't ever find their way back. I'd like to say that I think she does, but I don't think she does.
 
Thankfully CSL said, in a letter to a young fan who wrote to ask him this very question, that Susan still had time in this world to come to her senses, and they he believed she did.
:)
 
Douglas Gresham once remarked rather disdainfully about people who write "Saving Susan" stories. I think that he thinks that his stepfather intended Susan to be eternally lost--although I myself find it extremely hard to believe that anyone who had interacted so closely with Jesus, apart from Judas Iscariot, ever COULD go so far astray.
 
That's odd from Gresham, because it was in a book called CS Lewis' Letters to Children that I read, in Lewis' own words, the assurance that Susan still had time to return to belief in Narnia, and that he felt she would! If I come across the book here, I will put in the quote, but I am sure I read that.
 
Well, maybe what Mr. Gresham really meant was that he was unimpressed by the WAYS people were imagining Susan being redeemed.
 
Catherine said:
as much as i would like her too, i'm not sure that susan does get back on the right track. In most of the Narnia books ahve some sort of an allegory to them,a nd I think Lewis may have intended susan to represent those who get of the right track and don't ever find their way back. I'd like to say that I think she does, but I don't think she does.
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inkspot said:
That's odd from Gresham, because it was in a book called CS Lewis' Letters to Children that I read, in Lewis' own words, the assurance that Susan still had time to return to belief in Narnia, and that he felt she would! If I come across the book here, I will put in the quote, but I am sure I read that.
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i would like to think she saw Aslan Die and rirse again and aslan comforted her and gave her strength back its hard to imagine that she didn't But with cs lewis being allegorical or as we interpret it as that it might very well be i guess we will never know.
 
Joogie said:
Why did the Pevensie parents die as well? I don't think it further the plot very much at all, and it was a bit of coincidence. Is there some meaning behind it that I'm missing?

~Nelli.
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I personally think that the parents death was to totally strip Susan of everything comforting and familiar so that she would have to take a good look at her life and figure out how to keep living. If your siblings, parents, cousin, and even a random guy you stayed with once all died, you're not going to be very happy. With Susan's friends, air-headed happiness would probably be their entire lifestyle, and Susan's grief would scare them away. They wouldn't be able to deal with something real and sad, like the death of Susan's family, so they would cut Susan off from themselves and try to forget her. So, Susan would then have literally no one in the world that she can turn to, no one to comfort her. This couldn't have happened if her parents lived.

Even though C.S. Lewis never said what happened to Susan for sure, I personally always thought that this sudden isolation would force her to re-evaluate her life and priorities, and lead her to seek Aslan as He is in our world. We know that she and Peter probably had a similar conversation with Aslan at the end of Prince Caspian as Lucy and Edmund had in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, because Peter says, at the end of Prince Caspian, that "It's all rather different from what I thought. You'll understand when it comes to your last time." That means Susan knows that, if she's willing to look, she can find Aslan in England, too, and I really think she would.
 
The whole "Susan brainwashes herself" subplot always irritated me for some reason. I always thought it was a bit...I dunno, unrealistic. I mean, she spent how many years in Narnia?

Something must have fallen on her head and given her amnesia. Post LB she re-hit her head and it all came back to her.;) Like Random Harvest.

:rolleyes:

Actually, Susan was always my least favorite Pevensie...I didn't like her that much, but still, I kind of pity her and don't want to believe that she ended up in Hell. I agree with everyone who says losing her entire family probably shocked her back to her senses.

Grrrrr...I wish C.S. Lewis had been more specific and final on Susan's eventual fate. But I don't think he was interested in Susan anymore by the time he wrote LB. She seemed to be a character he didn't like.
 
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Laurel said:
Even though C.S. Lewis never said what happened to Susan for sure, I personally always thought that this sudden isolation would force her to re-evaluate her life and priorities, and lead her to seek Aslan as He is in our world. We know that she and Peter probably had a similar conversation with Aslan at the end of Prince Caspian as Lucy and Edmund had in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, because Peter says, at the end of Prince Caspian, that "It's all rather different from what I thought. You'll understand when it comes to your last time." That means Susan knows that, if she's willing to look, she can find Aslan in England, too, and I really think she would.
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That is an good reason, Laurel; perhaps Susan never learned to find Aslan in her world like the others. Maybe finding Aslan on earth was what made the 'Narnian experience' real for the rest of them and that the death of her family was God's way of reaching out to her. Lewis explains God's use of pain in, The Problem of Pain. He says 'Pain is Gods megaphone to rouse a deaf world'. It was the best thing God could have done for Susan so she would have another chance to one day see the real Narnia.
 
VeritasRatioque3D said:
Oh, and Narnia was never destroyed. It was the shadow of Narnia that was destroyed. All the characters (except Susan) find themselves in the real Narnia at the end of the LB. Why would you want to undo the destruction of a shadow? No one would want to go back to that shadow after they had experienced the “more real� Narnia.
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I agree but I thought it was rather peculiar when I read this in LB.
I think Susan's fate is up to the imagination of the reader. Though I do find her "over maturity" so to speak a bit disheartening but then again everyone has their own flaws........
 
Fastblondie, if you had joined here sooner, you would have seen several efforts, independent of each other, at speculating in fiction how Susan might be redeemed.
 
I read somewhere that C.S. Lewis said that Susan went out into the real world and got caught in glam and other things, and she totally forgot Narnia and Aslan. I hope she did find redemption and her way back to Narnia and Aslan. I wrote a fan-fiction about Susan learning of the deaths of her brothers and sister, and her really being upset, and wishing she was with them when they died.
 
On the note of Susan "brainwashing herself", I always felt like Susan didn't so much brainwash herself into forgetting Narnia but that she lost her faith and so she's shoved everything to do with Narnia into a tiny little box and pushed it away. The time they all lived in was certainly a difficult one and then I'd imagine that if Susan kept feeling like there wasn't someone coming in to save the day then she might as well focus on other things. After a while, you hide away even the possibility of faith because to believe again, to hope again, means to be broken again.
I know I went through a time for years where I told plenty of people I didn't believe in God or any of that organized religion junk. But in those dark hours, away from the rest of the world, oh I still believed, I was just so desperately trying not to, trying not to get my hopes up. And then there came the day when everything I'd built my life around fell apart and I realized that I didn't just want to believe anymore, I needed to.
I've always felt Susan was more there. She's pushed Aslan/Narnia away for so long, it would take a great effort for her to realize how much it all still mattered.
 
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