The Magician's Nephew Essay

“The Magician’s Nephew” by Clive Staples Lewis, or C. S. Lewis as he is more well-known, is a beautiful tale describing the birth of a land that many have come to know and love, the land of Narnia. The first book in the series, but sixth to be published, didn’t include beloved characters such as Lucy and Edmund but instead hinted towards the future endeavors that would be experienced in Narnia and the surrounding countries. Reading this book as a child, the individual is instantly enthralled by the mystery that lies in the neighborhood of Digory and Polly, two unlikely friends. Their adventurous nature makes for an enjoyable read, even when the adventure is merely Polly’s smugglers’ cave and beyond. But behind the excitement and wanderlust hides a parallel world. To
Lewis was writing his Christianity-fused novels, he was struggling with his own faith. Lewis was born in 1898 and grew up in a family of Protestants in Belfast, Ireland. He and his family were members of the Church of Ireland, and Lewis grew up learning about God. However, in 1908, Lewis lost his mother to cancer and lost his father to grief. The death of his mother convinced the young boy that the God he was learning of from the Bible that his mother had given him and the church was “if not cruel, at least a vague abstraction” (Lyle 1). Some years later under the influence of a spiritually unorthodox boarding school matron, Lewis became an atheist, forsaking the religion his mother had loved so dearly. He published a few books of poetry as an atheist under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton but eventually experienced what one would call a spiritual awakening. It was enhanced by the works of George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton, and even some of Lewis’s closest friends began “badgering Lewis about his materialism” (Lyle 1). He met more Christians such as J.R.R. Tolkien and realized that most of his friends and favorite authors had a religious angle of the world that threatened his own world