***TLB SPOILERS*** Susan at the end of TLB

MrBob

MrBob

Well-known member
If the mods want to merge this with another topic, I won't mind. I tried to think about where best this could go.

I had a thought earlier today while discussing Susan in TLB. She rejected Narnia as just a game that she and her siblings played as children. Because of this, she was not a part of the meeting where Tirian showed up and was thus not either traveling with Jill and Eustace nor was she with Peter and Edmund.

But was this actually a blessing for her? In TLB, the dwarves who refused to be taken in were not going to Aslan's Country as they no longer believed in Aslan and thus, they were stuck in a dark limbo forever. Had Susan been on that train or in the train station when her siblings were there, she would have suffered the same fate as those dwarves. She was once a Queen of Narnia, so she would definitely not have been rejected by Aslan, but at the same time, she had rejected Aslan so she would not have been able to find Aslan's Country.

By being allowed to live, she was given that extra time to find her spirituality and, if possible, remember her Narnia experiences with fondness. Aslan gave her another chance to join her siblings.

MrBoib
 
Oh, absolutely; only, it isn't just any old "spirituality" that Susan needs to find, but the Living God. Yes, an unbeliever being kept alive while family members who ARE ready to meet God are called away from this world is a mercy which really does happen often. As witness MY formerly God-mocking daughter, who was profoundly sobered by the death of her Christian mother (my first wife Mary), and eventually made her own commitment to Jesus.
 
That's a good point, Mr. Bob, and would be a good example of the "Severe Mercy" which God uses at times to get our attention. Various people, even on this forum, have speculated on what would have been the emotional effect on Susan of losing her parents and all her siblings in one catastrophe. Hopefully it would have been enough of a "jolt" to get her attention about the more important things in life.
 
It was indeed a blessing for Susan, whether or not she took advantage of it is a different story. If she did, it is good and the story ends all hunky-dory, if she didn't then she is sadly lost.
 
I think, though, if she had been included, and had at first been "blind" to her surroundings, as the dwarves were, she would probably have come around much more quickly than the dwarves did. She did have 15 years experience as a queen of Narnia, and she had loved Aslan very much, and -- I don't recall how old she would have been at this time -- but it hadn't been all that many years since they were all in Narnia for PC adventure ...

I think she would have been able to overcome the disability the dwarves had been afflicted with if she had been allowed to come. But I also believe, as Lewis did, that eventually in our world she did return to faith in Aslan.
 
That's actually a good point! I never thought of that. Aslan IS a symbol of Jesus; who specifically said he'd give us a chance and he'd forgive us seventy times seven. ;)
 
inkspot said:
I think she would have been able to overcome the disability the dwarves had been afflicted with if she had been allowed to come. But I also believe, as Lewis did, that eventually in our world she did return to faith in Aslan.
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I always wondered if there was any hope left for the dwarves at all. I believe one of them (don't recall who it was) said that only Aslan could help them now. But we don't know what happened to them in the end...

It reminds me a bit of the people in 'the great divorce' who are actually in the best place ever but they cannot see it themselves, only a few give up everything and finally see what's actually there. Do you think this is what happend to the dwarves?
 
Yes, I think Lewis had the same concept in mind, for kids in TLB and for adults in the Great Divorce. I think he believed in purgatory, and that perhaps, at some point, they could realize where they were and get out of it.

There is a parable of Jesus where an unforgiving debtor is cast into prison until he pays the last penny -- which implied that he could, eventually, get out of prison. So perhaps the dwarves could, eventually, get out of their shed.
 
[pet peeve]Dwarfs[/pet peeve]. Lewis doesn't use the same plural as Tolkien.

As to The Great Divorce, a huge favourite of mine, Lewis was at pains to point out (via the George Macdonald ghost, the narrator's guide) that the story was an allegory, and the points in it perfectly applicable to the choices people make before death, and in no way an imputation that it was possible to make a choice after. That said, it didn't explicitly deny such a possibility either.

"Because God is perfect Justice we must accept that Hell exists; because He is perfect Love we cannot say with certainty that there is anybody there." -- Attributed to "Father Duddleswell", the boss of "Neil Boyd" (pen-name of Peter de Rosa) of the Bless Me, Father books.
 
Nice to see your screen name, Malacandra! :)
Hope all is well with you.

Now is it dwarves or dwarfs?
 
Hi Inkspot! No job, and the cat got run over on Friday last, otherwise not too bad. Tolkien's Khazad are dwarves, Lewis's Sons of Earth are dwarfs, and I even humbled myself to check something I knew perfectly well :D by going and looking up the title of Chapter 13, "How the Dwarfs Refused to be Taken In".
 
There exists within the Letters of C.S. Lewis evidence that he was desirous to continue developing Susan's story and at some point address her ultimate fate. I have often wondered whether C.S. Lewis intended for Susan to serve as metaphor for, allusion to the rediscovery of his own faith as an adult, and his own redemption.
 
Welcome, Zimmie. I didn't see you post before. I like your idea very much! Because you know, as children Jack and Warnie did have an imaginary kingdom of their own, and even when they were spearated because Warnie went to school, they would write each other letters about what had happened to the talking animals, etc. in their private world they made up.

So .... maybe Jack was wanting Susan to sort of represent how he grew up and lost focus on the mythich and fantasy world (stopped believing in Narnia) but then found it was that same world, in the writings of George MacDonald, which reawakened his desire for a world beyond this one, a life beyond this life, and eventually opened his heart to God.

I had never considered this before. Good thought. :)
 
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