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That perspective can bring the reader to being undeceived, as you call it.

That's very evident in Orual in Till We Have Faces. She goes through this undeception. And there's lots of instances in the Narnia stories of this experience. It's something that's very important to Lewis because he'd gone through it himself because for many years he was an atheist. He was halfway through his life before he became a theist and then a Christian. So there was a huge undeception on his part.

How did Lewis understand the power of a story to undeceive?

Lewis was hugely influenced by Tolkien. Tolkien saw story as fundamental as language itself. He talks about language and story being coeval in the human being. Story has huge power to make what's normally abstract concrete, real. It has this ability to give you experience that you may have never had before as you imaginatively enter into the story. I don't know whether Lewis made anything of when after David's adultery, Nathan tells him a story. David gets caught into the story then suddenly realizes it's about him. That's a wonderful example. Lewis doesn't mention that but I imagine that he would say Amen to that.

You say that Lewis believed fantasy should change the reader. What sort of change did Lewis want the readers of the Chronicles to go through?

I think he wanted to create a climate in the reader, an imaginative and intellectual climate that would make the reader more able to receive the gospel when they heard it. He was preparing the ground for the gospel because he felt that the gospel itself was pointing to the deepest reality about nature—the kind of values and virtues that we were meant to have in order to be fully human. He was trying to make his readers more human. He was giving them the benefit of his deep learning to bring them on in this direction. So in a way he was humanizing his reader.

That's what all parent try to do, isn't it? They try to bring their children on and give them values to prepare them for life. He was fulfilling some of that role in his stories. You almost need to have children in order to read them the Chronicles of Narnia. It's an extra reason for having kids.

In the end, children do have to leave Narnia, but they don't have to leave the love of Aslan.

There's one place where Lucy's quite upset when she discovers she can't go back to Narnia, but Aslan points out that he's in her world, but under a different name.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Previous Christianity Today articles on C.S. Lewis and his writings include:

A Field Guide to Narnia is available from Christianbook.com and other book retailers.

Weblog: Forty Years Later, C.S. Lewis's Influence Tops JFK (Nov. 24, 2003)

J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, a Legendary Friendship | A new book reveals how these two famous friends conspired to bring myth and legend—and Truth—to modern readers. (Aug. 29, 2003)

The Dour Analyst and the Joyous Christian | In the realm of mental balance and personal peace, Sigmund Freud had nothing on C. S. Lewis. (April 19, 2002)

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June (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48