Making sense of "The Last Battle".
Posted: Oct 21, 2016 4:55 pm
"The Last Battle" is an enigmatic book. Lewis wrote it following The Magician's Nephew. Lewis married Joy Davidman Gresham who died of cancer in 1960. (Watch the film "Shadowlands" starring Anthony Hopkins as Lewis I you want to get a better understanding of the story.). Lewis' own mother died when he was a child. The Magician's Nephew is an expression of a wish that there was a magic place that could heal his wife and could have healed his mother. Joy died in 1960. Eight years earlier there was also a horrific train wreck at Harrow and Wealdstone that killed 112 and injured 340. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrow_ ... rail_crash I think that it is safe assume that this is the crash that kills the Pevensie family in The Last Battle. The wreck is heartbreaking to read about. One passenger train rear-ended another passenger at a station at full speed in foggy conditions and a third passenger train coming in the other direction on the parallel track plowed into the wreckage and damaged cars and derailed. To Lewis this must have begged the question what kind of just God would let it such misery? Lewis' meditations turned to the afterlife for solace. Plato had expressed that this world is only an imperfect representation of an ideal world, and that humanity is like people who watch shadows in a cave, mistaking the shadows for reality. So this is where the concept of the ideal Narnia and the ideal England are likely to come from. The charlatain character of the Ape Shift, might be inspired by the infamous 1950s demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy. Puzzle the Donkey is a metaphor for the working class, and his character very much mirrors that of the horse Boxer, from George Orwell's "Animal Farm" who is mislead and betrayed by the pigs. However, Puzzle comes to a much better end than Boxer, who is rewarded for his hard work by being sold to the knacker.