Did C.S. Lewis Create Narnia as an Allegory?
Adapted From: C.S. Lewis & Narnia For Dummies
Perhaps the single most common question about The Chronicles of Narnia asks whether Lewis wrote the series as an allegory. After all, even if your biblical knowledge is limited to a few Sunday school classes in third grade, you probably notice that Aslan has many similarities to Jesus Christ. If Lewis added that symbolism on purpose, does that mean that everything in Narnia represents something in the Bible?
C.S. Lewis makes clear that he didn't write the Narnian Chronicles as a biblical allegory. But you may be asking: How can this be true given the obvious symbolism used throughout the series? In order to understand Lewis's side of the story, you need to understand the difference between allegory and something he called supposal.
The gory details of allegory
An allegory is a literary device in which an author uses the form of a person, place, or animal to represent an abstract idea. For example, an eagle can represent the abstract concept of "freedom," a witch can represent "evil," or a photo of yours truly can express "amazing, profound wisdom."
Some of the more popular literature in history is allegorical. In Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, for example, Dante represents humanity as he journeys through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. In John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, concepts like hope and mercy become real-life characters in his saga of a man (named Christian) searching for salvation. So too, Lewis's first book written after his Christian conversion was The Pilgrim's Regress, a Bunyan-like allegory that describes his road to the Christian faith.
In The Allegory of Love, Lewis writes that when you use allegory, "you can start with [facts] . . . and can then invent . . . visible things to express them." He adds, "What is good or happy has always been high like the heavens and bright like the sun. Evil and misery were deep and dark from the first."
A slightly broader definition of allegory applies when an author represents real people or places in a fictional context. George Orwell's Animal Farm is a well-known example of this allegorical type. As a way of addressing the issues surrounding the Russian Revolution, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and other real historical figures are represented as pigs on a farm.
The Chronicles of Narnia is not in this genre. Lewis did not write the series as an allegory using his fantasy setting to represent abstract concepts or real people. In terms of literary style, the series bears no parallels to allegorical works like The Divine Comedy, Animal Farm, or even Lewis's own The Pilgrim's Regress.
In fact, Lewis explicitly warns readers against trying to make a one-for-one match between Narnia and the real world. In a May 1954 letter to a fifth grade class in Maryland, he writes, "You are mistaken when you think everything in the books 'represents' something in this world. Things do that in The Pilgrim's Progress but I'm not writing in that way."
Supposedly, there's a supposal
Although Lewis makes it clear that The Chronicles of Narnia isn't an allegory, he doesn't deny that some symbolism was written into the series. But, to understand his approach, you need to recognize that Lewis differentiates allegory from something he calls supposal. In a December 1959 letter to a young girl named Sophia Storr, he explains the difference:
I don't say. 'Let us represent Christ as Aslan.' I say, 'Supposing there was a world like Narnia, and supposing, like ours, it needed redemption, let us imagine what sort of Incarnation and Passion and Resurrection Christ would have there.'
Allegory and supposal aren't identical devices, according to Lewis, because they deal with what's real and what's unreal quite differently. In an allegory, the ideas, concepts, and even people being expressed are true, but the characters are make-believe. They always behave in a way reflective of the underlying concepts they're representing. A supposal is much different; the fictional character becomes "real" within the imaginary world, taking on a life of its own and adapting to the make-believe world as necessary. If, for example, you accept the supposal of Aslan as true, then Lewis says, "He would really have been a physical object in that world as He was in Palestine, and His death on the Stone Table would have been a physical event no less than his death on Calvary."
Aslan isn't an allegory of Jesus Christ. Instead, he's a supposal. Lewis emphasizes this point in a December 1958 letter to a lady named Mrs. Hook:
[Aslan] 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.
Much of The Chronicles of Narnia is built on the concept of supposal. For example:
- Suppose Christ came into the world of Narnia as Aslan. What would he be like?
- Suppose Aslan created Narnia out of nothing and centuries later brought it to a conclusion. How would these stories play out?
- Suppose evil were introduced into Narnia. What would that be like?
- Suppose a person or talking animal could freely choose to obey or disobey Aslan. What would life in Narnia be like?
By using supposal, Lewis doesn't feel compelled to have a direct 1 to-1 correlation between the experiences of Aslan and the real life of Jesus Christ. In his letter to Sophia Storr, Lewis talks of this freedom: "When I started The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I don't think I foresaw what Aslan was going to do and suffer. I think He just insisted on behaving in His own way."
Using supposal as the vehicle for getting him there, Lewis views The Chronicles of Narnia as myth. He explains that an allegory is a story with a single meaning, but a myth is a story that can have many meanings for different readers in different generations. According to Lewis, an author puts into an allegory "only what he already knows," but in a myth, he puts "what he does not yet know and could not come by in any other way."
