Narnia’s Most Debated Ending Isn’t the Problem Fans Think It Is

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    Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures</figure>

Tragically, this is largely in step with Susan’s priorities throughout the novels. In LWW, for instance, she refuses to entertain Lucy’s experience even after Professor Kirke (a “grown-up”) suggests she should. Indeed, upon arriving in Narnia, she more than once desires to go back, even wishing to abandon Mr. Tumnus to the White Witch. Susan didn’t simply “mature” out of Narnia — it’s all rooted in something deeper, and Prince Caspian gives us a clue as to what that is. Here, Susan is famously the last one to see Aslan, refusing again to believe Lucy; even worse, she makes a fuss when the others do. Looking back, it’s hard to see all this as anything but foreshadowing for The Last Battle. While Lewis does show us a Susan who embraces her queenly role in A Horse and His Boy, she loses sight of who she was and who crowned her when back on Earth.

Susan always struggled with faith. In Prince Caspian, she confides to Lucy that she “really believed” all along that Aslan had been calling them — or, more accurately, as she admits, “I could have, if I let myself.” As Aslan soon tells her, she allowed fear to cloud her faith, keeping her from trusting what she could not see. In the case of The Last Battle, we can’t fully know why she chose to reject Narnia. Perhaps it was in fear of seemingly losing Aslan again like before. Of course, if this were the case, one would suspect that Peter, Digory, or Polly (all the eldest of the Friends) would have wrestled with these same fears. Instead, Lewis leans into Susan’s pre-established dispositions, perhaps being more true to her character than readers would have preferred.

At the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader — in which Susan does not appear — Aslan reveals to Edmund, Lucy, and Eustace the entire point of their fantasy adventures: “…by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.” This was Lewis’ in-text revelation that Aslan was meant to be a “supposal” of how Jesus Christ might appear in another world. In a sense, Narnia was a “spiritual training ground” for the Pevensies, meant to teach them how to fully recognize Christ in their world. As the character who most struggles with the notion of faith (i.e., believing without always seeing), Susan became swept up in unbelief, and thus was unable to grasp the deeper truths of Narnia. For her, “growing up” wasn’t really about having more “mature experiences,” but a way to escape the pain of losing those years she spent elsewhere.

Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life
looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in
return.

You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and
somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right
thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.

• This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat,
  fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
• You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost
  everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
• The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives
  every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
• You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.

You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where
you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is
finding out what is over there.

• One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who
  each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
• You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off
  somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
• The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land
  harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
• You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of
  it.

You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The
Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the
people are where it all gets complicated.

• Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is
  a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
• You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the
  Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
• The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a
  rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
• You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story
  got told wrong.

You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and
you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as
everybody kept telling you.

• Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners,
  which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
• You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for
  something nobody thought to test for.
• The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud
  every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
• Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you
  difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.

The Chronicles of Narnia Is Not the End of Susan’s Story

• Art by Pauline Baynes

• Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

• Image via HarperCollins

• Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

• Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

• Art by Pauline Baynes

• Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

• Image via HarperCollins

• Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

• Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

While Peter declares with sorrow that Susan is “no longer a friend of Narnia,” that does not mean she’s been rejected by Aslan as an outcast forever. The book leaves her fate uncertain, but Lewis always believed her story continued. In a 1957 letter collected in C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Children, the author states: “She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there’s plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s Country in the end . . . in her own way.” Lewis would not have cared so little for Susan as to leave her in complete hopelessness. Perhaps, by removing her family from the picture, he was giving her the opportunity to finally reflect on her life and choose faith for herself, finding Aslan through her grief — something Lewis, who would later pen A Grief Observed, knew quite a bit about.

In a 1960 letter recorded in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, the author admits that he couldn’t write this story himself. “Not that I have no hope of Susan’s ever getting to Aslan’s Country,” he explained, “but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write.” Instead, he encouraged readers to write that story themselves. As Stuart Hunt of Into the Wardrobe points out, Lewis famously struggled with his faith. Though he was raised Anglican, he rejected religion entirely in his younger years before returning to Christianity in his early 30s (with the help of his friend J.R.R. Tolkien). Understanding this, it appears that the author’s intent was never to push Susan aside, but to express a part of himself in her that simply could not be explored in these seven books — something many would relate to as they, too, grew up.

Susan Pevensie may be the most tragic character in The Chronicles of Narnia, but she is certainly not without hope. After all, as even Lewis himself once said, “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” Of course, we can always fall back on Aslan’s own words: “Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen.”

Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew hits theaters in 2027.