Representations of Satan in the Narnia chronicles by C.S. Lewis

M.A.Although a serious Christian apologist and academic writer, Clive Staples Lewis was also well known (and loved) for his fictional works. Lewis was of the opinion that one's faith and chosen profession cannot be separated and he thus aligned the two in his own writing (Schultz and West 1998: 120). Therefore, his writings reflect his Christian faith (after his conversion in 1931) and, although his Ransom (Cosmic) Trilogy (1938, 1943 and 1945), mythological work Till We Have Faces (1956) and The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956) are not openly theological, they all deal with figurative representations of both Christ and the Biblical devil. Many studies have explored Lewis's portrayal of Biblical truths in his fictional writing. As Christopher Mitchell pointed out in his essay entitled "Bearing the Weight of Glory," a few months before his death, Lewis stated that he was writing in order to bring about an encounter between the reader and Christ (Mills 1998: 5). While on the surface these novels are not emphatically about the battle between heaven and hell, underlying the stories is a broader message of rivalry between good and evil. A student of Lewis's, Harry Blamires, remembers Lewis saying that he went about the task of writing The Chronicles of Narnia much as he did the writing of his serious theological work, Mere Christianity (Mills 1998: 15). Much research has thus been conducted to explore Lewis's portrayal of God in his fiction, yet there has been very little research on his metaphysical perspective on Satan. His fictional novels — most notably The Chronicles of Namia — are largely allegorical and often subtly allude to the devil through the characters. It is this subtle allusion to evil, and specifically characteristics of the Biblical Satan in The Chronicles, that I would like to explore in this dissertation