Animal Characters in Narnia- Heidi Naylor

Narnia is a land filled with talking animals. The thought of such a place has always been an exciting one, but I’ve never quite looked at it as Lewis explained in “On Stories”. In this book, Lewis talks about Kenneth Grahame’s choice to use animals in his writing as one that seeks to un-complicate matters. As Lewis states, “If you try to rewrite the book with all the characters humanized you are faced at the outset with a dilemma. Are they to be adults or children? You will find that they can be neither. They are like children in so far as they have no responsibilities, no struggle for existence, no domestic cares… In that way the life of all the characters is that of children for who everything is provided and who takes everything for granted. But in other ways it is the life of adults. They go where they like and do what they please, they arrange their own lives” (14).

Regarding Narnia, I think the exact same can be said. I never once wondered where Aslan sleeps every night, whether someone is worried about him coming home, or what he eats. I never questioned Mr. and Mrs. Beaver ability to look out for Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, why Mr. Tumnas lives by himself, or what Reepicheep thinks about the world. As it seems, by using animals as characters in Narnia, Lewis is able to avoid the kinds of questions that would normally accompany a story filled with children and adults. I agree with Lewis in that, re-writing this story without animals would raise too many questions; perhaps this is why most children stories involve animals.