JFGII wrote:The only problem is how to deal with The Last Battle, where no one who knew Narnia is around for Lewis to interview - except for Susan, and she’s done with Narnia by that point in the book series. Do I sense a change in her character? Maybe a dream she had about where her family went after... (spoilers...). I don’t know, but Susan is the only main character to go back to an ordinary life, so, maybe Aslan gives her a sign of hope in the form of a story she tells Lewis. Only she thinks it’s all in her head, but he knows it really happened. How’s that?
That's an interesting idea. (I'm reminded a bit of The Great Divorce.) Maybe the interviewer is a relative of Polly, seeking to compile tales of Narnia from stories she told him and manuscripts she left behind, and so he meets with Susan to see what she may know about these "childhood games" that were the inspiration for what would become renowned author Polly Plummer's posthumous book series... and then Susan tells him the dream in startling detail and they both get an eerie feeling that the stories are more than just stories.
Something that makes the Narrator's identity a challenge for me, though, is I've always gotten the sense that they've been to Narnia — tasted the food, smelled the scents, seen the sights — and that they've somehow travelled through many eras of Narnia's history. This is largely due to the richness of Lewis's inner world, but every time I read the last lines of The Silver Chair, I get a little thrill and can't help but wonder (no matter how old I get) if Lewis was more widely-travelled then his biographers realize.
So in that sense, if the Narrator had an identity that was not actually Lewis... then I tend to think only a Friend of Narnia would fit. And among them: Digory Kirke, or possibly Polly Plummer. (Think of her writing stories in her attic, described at the beginning of MN.) That said, since the Narrator is essentially Lewis to me, and since Professor Kirke is the closest to Lewis in the stories, I think I would prefer that the Chronicles be collaboration between all the Friends of Narnia but especially the older two members, with Digory acting as oral historian and Polly threading everything together.
If the adaptation portrayed grown-up Polly as a children's author (and I do expect for them to develop her character as an adult) then I can imagine someone (Susan?) finding the manuscripts to the Chronicles mysteriously tucked away in her writing desk after the train accident. Whether the completed stories had somehow come back to our world from Aslan's Country, or gone on writing themselves "by magic" after the train accident before arriving at The End — the viewer would be left to wonder.