Zack Olander - Chronicles of Narnia pt. 2

 This is more of a general point about the Narnia books, using a little bit of Nietzsche to make sense of it:

Most literary scholars endorse the view that Lewis's Narnia books are highly allegorical to Christian myth and that the character Aslan is a stand-in for Jesus Christ himself. However, Lewis himself was very consciously resistant to the idea that his Narnia stories were at all allegorical, similar to J.R.R. Tolkien's feelings on his own works on Middle-Earth. Is the Christian influence overestimated by his readers?

Maybe not. In his work Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche writes the first essay of the book, titled The Prejudices of Philosophers, mostly talking about how he thinks that philosophers are not as rational as they think they are and that they all have some sort of agenda beyond getting at "Truth," however unconscious this agenda is. As far as I am aware, this is the first scholarly work that implies the existence of the unconscious mind, and that all writers, Nietzsche says, even Nietzsche included, have an unconscious agenda that they are moving towards that can become apparent in their writing.

I think this idea might have some sort of usefulness when it comes to fictional works like the Narnia books. Lewis himself denied using allegory, yet reading his Narnia books, it seems like there is allegory all over the place, which to me suggests that there might be some unconscious dimension to writing.

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