The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Study Guide

C. S. Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898 to a father who was a solicitor and a mother who came from a family with several priests and bishops in it. When he was four, his dog Jacksie was killed by a car, and from then on, friends and family referred to him as “Jacksie,” which soon turned into “Jack.” His mother died of cancer when he was nine, and he went to school in both England and Ireland, including at Oxford. Although Lewis became an atheist at age 15, he converted to Christianity later in life, and it became a major part of his writing, both fiction and nonfiction. Most of Lewis’s significant writing occurred after his conversion. His first novel in 1933, The Pilgrim’s Regress, did not find much success, but he earned more of a reputation as a novelist with subsequent novels The Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters, and The Great Divorce. Lewis also gained a reputation as one of the leading Christian apologists of his time (with “apology” meaning an argument that defends a subject). His nonfiction books, which include Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain, are some of the most famous in their genre. Still, Lewis remains best known for his Narnia novels, a young adult fantasy series that he first conceived in 1939 and began publishing in 1950 with The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Lewis died in 1963, but his books, particularly the Narnia series, have remained popular with readers.

C. S. Lewis began writing the Narnia series shortly after the end of World War II, and the series begins with an incident inspired by real history: children are evacuated from London to the English countryside for their own safety. Most of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader takes inspiration from a much older period of history, however: the Age of Exploration. This period, beginning in the 15th century, is when European countries began to explore and colonize the rest of the world, traveling on long ocean voyages. One of the most consistent criticisms made against Lewis is that his works can be interpreted as endorsing colonialism, the practice of one country exploiting another country (often violently) for resources. Colonialism is a major part of British history, and Britain’s rise as a global empire was only possible because of its control over far-flung colonies, including India, Malaysia, and Jamaica. Although colonialism is widely condemned today because it inflicted violence and injustice on the people of the colonies, in the past colonialism had open supporters who believed that colonialism was beneficial for both the colonizer and the colonized. Such views were founded on the (often racist) belief that colonized people weren’t capable of taking care of themselves and needed the influence of “civilization.” Many argue that a version of this worldview appears in Lewis’s work, where Caspian (a monarch who leads a “civilized” nation like historical Britain) frequently has to save islanders who are greedy, violent, or stupid. Lewis is far from the only British writer with potential themes of colonialism in his work (with Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling being other prominent examples), and the debate continues as to how this might affect their legacy as writers.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader contains strong Christian themes, and so the Bible is one of its major influences. A passage in the novel where Aslan helps Eustace by throwing him into water recalls the Christian concept of baptism, which appears prominently in the Gospels. Lewis also drew inspiration from other writers who found ways to combine Christian allegories with fantasy in their works, including Dante Alighieri (The Divine Comedy) and John Milton (Paradise Lost). Perhaps the most influential fantasy writer of the twentieth century was J. R. R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings), and Tolkien was also a close friend of Lewis’s and part of the same literary group at Oxford. Some have suggested that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has its roots in a genre of Celtic fables called Immram about sea journeys to the underworld. Lewis also drew from other literary sea stories, including The Odyssey (by Homer), Gulliver’s Travels (by Jonathan Swift), and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge). Lewis’s Narnia books have become influential classics of the young adult fantasy genre, with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials being a direct response to Lewis’s series.