Note II on Lewis

[breakinglight11]

One incredibly amusing thing in Surprised by Joy. I have met a number of people who say that they can't fully enjoy a lot of Lewis's work because they were distracted and annoyed by the Christian overtones. Apparently, before his conversion, Lewis was a fan of a lot of Christian authors who at the same time irritated him because he was distracted and annoyed by the Christian overtones. :-)

On a related note, despite being raised Christian and having been exposed to the Narnia books from a very young age, I did not detect the religious significance until it was pointed out to me by a book of commentary on the series. Didn't notice it at all, even in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where it is the most overt. Maybe I was a remarkably slow child. That is possible. In fact, I went to a week-long church camp once with an extremely heavy Narnia theme, and I was completely perplexed as to why it was present at all-- the connection escaped me that completely. The fact that they never bothered to EXPLAIN the connection, probably just taking for granted that it existed and that we quite small children were aware of it, may not have been the best way to deal with the matter for us kiddies. ;-)

Comments

[neuromancerzss.livejournal.com]

I didn't detect it either when I read the books during my childhood. I guess he did a good job of crafting an interesting story and a bad job of hitting us over the head with the metaphor.

[laurion]

I picked up on it in high school (wrote a major paper on it), but here's why a lot of it gets missed, I think -- children aren't taught Christianity as much as they are indoctrinated in it one day a week. And in that process, a wall is built, separating the miracles and high natures of religion from the every day mediums. Sure, kids are told to see the divine in the mundane, but it is usually phrased to mean the mundane as nature, random occurrence, etc., and not deliberate creations of other men. If you grow up in a culture where the religion is truly a part of daily practice (daily cultures, dominant stories of the time, etc.) and not just weekly passive experience, you might be more likely to see the parallels. So I think as we get older and can start seeing below the surface on our own, we no longer need to have the parallels preestablished, we can think critically and recognize the metaphor.

Want another one? Sebastian in The Never Ending Story is also Jesus. Go check it out again. Especially the whole Word creating the Universe thing. But don't watch the sequel movie, that was just hollywood.