The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: Chapter 6 “The Adventures of Eustace”

C.S. Lewis Read-Along, Vol. 3, Issue 7

Note: Normally, most of the read-along is for paid subscribers only, but I wanted to make the top half, the background section, available for everyone this week. I hope this serves as a fun welcome to new subscribers and a thank you to everyone. Enjoy!

Chapter 6 “The Adventures of Eustace”

Background: Through his own fantasy adventure, C.S. Lewis makes the case for reading fiction and fantasy. Those stories don’t give us more encyclopedic knowledge and information, but they do prepare us for encounters with the supernatural as well as natural but unexpected adventures.

Foreground: We can read Eustace’s journey and appreciate his transformation from a distance. It’s much more difficult and painful to experience those soul-making seasons in our lives. But just as we know Eustace needs to endure this time as a dragon, we can trust that God will use all the moments in our lives to make us who we were created to be.

Quote: “When he thought of this the poor dragon that had been Eustace lifted up its voice and wept. A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.”

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Background: “The Adventures of Eustace”

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we learn a lot about Eustace, but one of the primary truths of his character is that he read all the wrong books. On the first page of the story, the narrator tells us that Eustace only liked informative, non-fiction books.

Throughout the book, the narrator returns to this comment on his reading habits. Even Eustace himself notes that he doesn’t understand some things because they come “in the sort of books those Pevensie kids read.” In “The Adventures of Eustace,” we find one of those things is dragons.

Eustace sees what is quite obviously a dragon crawling out of a cave, but he has no frame of reference for it. “Edmund or Lucy or you would have recognized it at once, but Eustace had read none of the right books.” Because he’s never read about them, he can’t properly judge what’s happening. “But perhaps if he had known something about dragons he would have been a little surprised at this dragon’s behavior.”

Eventually, Eustace runs into the dragon’s cave, but without any light can’t make out what is lying all over the ground. “Most of us know what we expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had lots to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.”

Lewis’ reading was not “weak on dragons,” and this is part of what led him out of atheism and to Christianity. He read and loved Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene as an adolescent. Writing to his friend Author Greeves, he said he had been reading the poem on weekends for six months. Finishing it, Lewis tells Greeves that he wished Spenser “had lived to write six books more as he hoped to do—so much have I enjoyed it.” In the poem, Spenser draws from the legend of St. George and the dragon.

Additionally, George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton both appreciated the story of the dragon-slaying patron saint of England. Chesterton, in a quote famously paraphrased by Neil Gaiman, wrote, “Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”

“The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.” — G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

Lewis said MacDonald’s Phantastes “baptized his imagination” and Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man set out the whole Christian outline of history “in a form that seemed to me to make sense.” In Surprised by Joy, Lewis wrote, “In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful in his reading.”

After his conversion, Lewis would encounter dragons again from one of the men who helped convince him of Christianity’s truthfulness. He read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit before it was published. In a glowing review of his friend’s book, Lewis said even the name of the dwarves and dragon “catch our eyes as we first ruffle the pages.”

Unlike Eustace, Lewis would’ve been able to spot a dragon if he saw one, but these fictional dragons and dragon-familiar authors snuck up on him when he was an atheist. That’s one of his stated reasons for writing The Chronicles of Narnia to “sneak past watchful dragons” in the lives of others.

You might learn countless facts by reading books with “pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools,” as Eustace did. But you won’t see a model for handling an unforeseen problem or embarking on an unexpected adventure. When the dragon appears, without the right stories, you can’t know that a St. George is also there to slay the dragon.

Through his own fantasy adventure, C.S. Lewis makes the case for reading fiction and fantasy. Those stories don’t give us more encyclopedic knowledge and information, but they do prepare us for encounters with the supernatural as well as natural but unexpected adventures.

In “The Adventures of Eustace,” we see how our reading can help pave the way for changes in our perspective, but experience is also quite the teacher. God seeks to use the difficult seasons in our lives to shape us into the people we were created to be. As Lewis explained in The Problem of Pain, suffering can serve as God’s megaphone to help us hear Him call us to something better.