While The Voyage of the Dawn Treader features a revolving cast of characters, everything begins with Eustace, a young boy who wants nothing to do with adventure or the people of Narnia. Eustace’s main flaws are his selfishness and his limited worldview. When he gets sold into slavery in Narnia, he throws a tantrum and demands to see the British Consul, not realizing that the world of Narnia operates according to very different rules from his own world. In one of Eustace’s most selfish acts, during a storm on the Dawn Treader, he refuses to help and tries to steal water, potentially endangering the rest of the crew. When he finally gets a chance to be on his own, Eustace continues to act greedily, at one point stealing a golden armband from a dragon’s horde and getting turned into a dragon himself.
Eustace’s transformation into a dragon is partly a punishment, because being a dragon is a dreary existence, but it also teaches Eustace the value of his companions. Being separated from Edmund and Lucy helps Eustace learn how bad it feels to be lonely. And when Eustace reunites with his cousins, his new skills as a dragon also teach him how it can feel good to help other people and be part of a crew. Eustace’s character transformation culminates with a baptism-like scene where the powerful Aslan helps Eustace regain his human form. Having learned the consequences of greed, Eustace isn’t instantly a perfect character, but he nevertheless shows what he’s learned by throwing away the golden armband that he once greedily grabbed. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace’s reluctant journey to maturity shows how selfishness can isolate a person but helping others can be a way to find companionship and purpose.
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Growing Up and Selflessness ThemeTracker
Growing Up and Selflessness Quotes in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
THERE WAS A BOY CALLED EUSTACE Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
There was not much difficulty in settling the matter once Eustace realized that everyone took the idea of a duel seriously and heard Caspian offering to lend him a sword, and Drinian and Edmund discussing whether he ought to be handicapped in some way to make up for his being so much bigger than Reepicheep. He apologized sulkily and went off with Lucy to have his hand bathed and bandaged and then went to his bunk. He was careful to lie on his side.
I got out all right into the big room, if you can call it a room, where the rowing benches and the luggage are. The thing of water is at this end. All was going beautifully, but before I’d drawn a cupful who should catch me but that little spy Reep. I tried to explain that I was going on deck for a breath of air (the business about the water had nothing to do with him) and he asked me why I had a cup. He made such a noise that the whole ship was roused. They treated me scandalously. I asked, as I think anyone would have, why Reepicheep was sneaking about the water cask in the middle of the night. He said that as he was too small to be any use on deck, he did sentry over the water every night so that one more man could go to sleep. Now comes their rotten unfairness: they all believed him. Can you beat it?
The fog lifted. He was in an utterly unknown valley and the sea was nowhere in sight.
He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.
“Well, anyway, I looked up and saw the very last thing I expected: a huge lion coming slowly toward me. And one queer thing was that there was no moon last night, but there was moonlight where the lion was. So it came nearer and nearer. I was terribly afraid of it. You may think that, being a dragon, I could have knocked any lion out easily enough. But it wasn’t that kind of fear. I wasn’t afraid of it eating me, I was just afraid of it—if you can understand.”
“The King who owned this island,” said Caspian slowly, and his face flushed as he spoke, “would soon be the richest of all Kings of the world. I claim this land forever as a Narnian possession. It shall be called Goldwater Island. And I bind all of you to secrecy. No one must know of this. Not even Drinian—on pain of death, do you hear?”
“Who are you talking to?” said Edmund. “I’m no subject of yours. If anything it’s the other way round. I am one of the four ancient sovereigns of Narnia and you are under allegiance to the High King my brother.”
“I will say the spell,” said Lucy. “I don’t care. I will.” She said I don’t care because she had a strong feeling that she mustn’t.
But when she looked back at the opening words of the spell, there in the middle of the writing, where she felt quite sure there had been no picture before, she found the great face of a lion, of The Lion, Aslan himself, staring into hers.
“Dearest,” said Aslan very gently, “you and your brother will never come back to Narnia.”
“Oh, Aslan!!” said Edmund and Lucy both together in despairing voices.
“You are too old, children,” said Aslan, “and you must begin to come close to your own world now.”
“Only two more things need to be told. One is that Caspian and his men all came safely back to Ramandu’s Island. And the three lords woke from their sleep. Caspian married Ramandu’s daughter and they all reached Narnia in the end, and she became a great queen and the mother and grandmother of great kings. The other is that back in our own world everyone soon started saying how Eustace had improved, and how “You’d never know him for the same boy”: everyone except Aunt Alberta, who said he had become very commonplace and tiresome and it must have been the influence of those Pevensie children.
