Mikaela Martinez Dettinger: Homo-Narrans and The Chronicles of Narnia

 In this week's class we finished the biographical film on C.S. Lewis. An important quote that was discussed in class was from one of Lewis' students whose father said "We read to know we are not alone".  While this had significance for the plot of the film, it also has significance in the analysis of Lewis' writings, especially his stories in The Chronicles of Narnia. 

    In the timeline of the movie, this quote struck Lewis after he had written The Chronicles of Narnia so it is important to recognize that it is not the significance of the quote as an inspiration to Lewis that seemed significant to me. Rather, what stood out was that it harkened back to Walter Fisher's essay Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument, specifically his mention of humans being a species that relies on storytelling as a primary mode of communicating information. The first connection made between this concept of homo narrans and Lewis' stories is the surface-level connection that Lewis' stories are a prime example of storytelling being used to portray a message. Yes, The Chronicles of Narnia contain Christian allusions, but Lewis recognized in letters that this was not an intentional plan. So, instead of focusing on the possibility that Lewis wrote to teach his Christian beliefs, I will focus on the idea that Lewis wrote for children and in a way that children may feel understood by the story. 

    Dr. Redick expanded on The Chronicles of Narnia with the observation that Lewis portrays children with emotional intelligence. In The Magician's Nephew, for example, Digory experiences deep pain at the prospect of his mother's imminent death. Lewis wrote The Magician's Nephew before he watched the children of his wife suffer her loss, but he had his own experience of losing his mother as a child. It can be a reasonable assumption to say he probably drew from that experience when he included Digory's trauma. In this way, it seems to me that Lewis was writing to appeal to children who had his shared experience. He was writing to know he was not alone and to let children know that they are not alone. 

    This relates back to homo narrans in the sense that Lewis was creating a mode of communicating with children about dense subjects, such as the loss of a parent, through a format that is most easily understood, storytelling. From what can be assumed from the timeline of the film and the letters of Lewis' read in class, it may be that Lewis did not do this intentionally. The unintentionally of Lewis' story-telling communication supports that man is a storytelling creature. In the case of Lewis, storytelling was communicating with children and, in doing so, creating a community of his readers who could all communicate about difficult subjects using the language of Narnia.