The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Review

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the most formally unusual of the Narnia books: an episodic voyage narrative, each island presenting a new challenge, temptation, or mystery, with no overarching antagonist and no single dramatic confrontation driving the plot. It is, in this sense, closer to Homer’s Odyssey than to the quest structure of most fantasy — and the comparison is not accidental. Lewis was a scholar of medieval and classical literature, and the journey to the world’s edge has deep roots in the traditions he knew best.

The book’s great achievement is Eustace Scrubb. He is introduced as a thoroughly unpleasant child — selfish, pedantic, the product of progressive parents and a progressive school, someone who has read only “books of information” and who has no imagination and no courtesy. Lewis enjoys the satirical portrait, but he is also genuinely interested in what happens to a person like Eustace when Narnia gets hold of him. The answer is the novel’s most famous episode: Eustace, having sneaked away from the group to escape the work of the voyage, discovers a dragon’s hoard and falls asleep on it thinking dragonish thoughts. He wakes as a dragon. The transformation is not a punishment but a revelation — his interior state made visible.

What makes the episode theologically significant is what follows. Eustace tries to scratch off his dragon skin himself and cannot get deep enough. Aslan arrives, and the undragoning — the stripping away of layer after layer of scales until the boy beneath is exposed, raw and weeping, and plunged into the water — is Lewis’s most direct image of what grace does that effort cannot. It is painful, it cannot be done by the one who needs it, and it leaves the recipient transformed rather than merely improved.

The ending, in which Edmund, Lucy, and Eustace must return home while Reepicheep the mouse sails alone into Aslan’s country beyond the world’s edge, is handled with the particular kind of beauty that Lewis achieved when he stopped explaining and simply rendered. The great wave of sweet water, the whiteness of the shore, the lamb that becomes Aslan: it is the most purely transcendent passage in the series, and it earns its effect without effort.

The Quest and the Seven Lords

Published in 1952, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader sends Edmund and Lucy Pevensie back to Narnia — this time without Peter and Susan, who are judged too old to return — accompanied by their unpleasant cousin Eustace Scrubb. They are pulled into Narnia through a painting of a ship, and find themselves aboard the Dawn Treader itself, the vessel of King Caspian, now grown and secure on his throne. Caspian has set out on a quest with two purposes: to find the seven lords loyal to his father who were sent away by the usurper Miraz and never returned, and, beyond that practical aim, to sail as far east as a ship can go, toward the very edge of the world and the country of Aslan that is said to lie beyond it. The episodic structure follows the ship from island to island, each landfall recovering the fate of one of the lost lords while presenting a distinct moral or imaginative test.

Reepicheep’s Longing

The voyage’s deepest current is supplied not by Caspian but by Reepicheep, the valiant talking mouse introduced in Prince Caspian. For Reepicheep the journey east is not a search for lost lords but a pilgrimage: he believes that beyond the world’s edge lies Aslan’s own country, and he intends to reach it, alone if necessary, never to return. A prophecy spoken over his cradle has set his whole life pointing eastward. Lewis treats this longing — the desire for something beyond the world that the world itself cannot satisfy — as the most serious thing in the book. It is the emotion he elsewhere called Sehnsucht, and Reepicheep embodies it without irony. When the mouse finally sails his little coracle over the last wave into the unknown, it is the fulfilment of a yearning the entire voyage has been building toward, and it gives the novel’s ending its peculiar power.

The World Behind the Books

C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) wrote the Narnia books quickly, between 1949 and 1954, while holding a demanding post as a tutor in English literature at Oxford. A medievalist by training, he filled the voyage with materials drawn from the literature he taught: the immram, the Irish tradition of wonder-voyages to islands of marvels; the medieval maps with their monsters at the edges; the classical idea of a journey to the world’s rim. His friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien and the other Inklings sustained him through the writing, and the same imaginative seriousness that produced Mere Christianity and the Space Trilogy informs the apparently light island-hopping of the Dawn Treader. The book wears its learning lightly, but it is there in every chapter.

On Screen

A film adaptation was released in 2010, the third in the live-action Narnia series and the first produced by 20th Century Fox after Disney declined to continue. It compressed and rearranged the novel’s episodic structure into a more conventional single quest, inventing a unifying threat — a green mist embodying evil — to give the wandering voyage a clearer antagonist. The changes were necessary for the screen but inevitably sacrificed some of the book’s distinctive open-endedness, its sense of a journey shaped by wonder rather than by plot. Reepicheep, voiced with great spirit, remained the adaptation’s emotional centre, and the final approach to the world’s end was rendered with real visual beauty. The film performed respectably but did not lead to further instalments in that series, leaving the Dawn Treader as, for the time being, the last of the Pevensie-era films.