The Last Battle pt 10


and she will walk through the fire and let it burn

Because they think it means C.S Lewis is saying people who don’t believe in God can’t get into Heaven, which is just awful, you know, to say that someone can’t have something they don’t believe exists anyway. And of course it is a statement about all non believers, not just a statement about a specific person choosing not to believe in a specific God even though she knows full well he really exists because she has met him. He crowned her queen of a whole country which she ruled jointly for about fifteen years. Edmund didn’t know any better when he betrayed his siblings. Susan definitely knew better when she rejected Aslan’s gifts in favor of boys, makeup and partying. C.S Lewis is not saying boys, makeup and partying are bad things, he’s saying doing them to the extent that you reject your god is a bad thing. That’s a pretty standard view in most religions. That is the way Religion Works. Even if you worship the Goddess of Makeup and Parties, sooner or later she will expect you to put down the Revlon and pay attention when she’s talking. As gods go, Aslan is a pretty lenient one, much easier to please than his our world counterpart anyway. It wasn’t that hard, even one of the villains managed to get it right.

And it’s not about not believing, it’s about *pretending* not to believe when you know the other people aren’t lying and ridiculing them for believing. Once again, that’s a lesson Edmund learned in LWW and was scolded for it by his entire family. Susan is the smug character who thought she was a shoo in because she never screwed up like the others. Susan thought she was safe, and she wasn’t because unlike Peter, Ed and Lucy, she learned nothing that entire time they were in Narnia, because she never let herself make mistakes. She equated managing not to screw up with true spiritual growth. So she takes Narnia for granted until it becomes “just a silly game” to her. But you can’t learn the truth about redemption until you screw up. Which is not only one of the most important themes throughout the entire series but one of the most important themes of the whole Bible (both halves).

It’s just as much a criticism of Smug Christians as it is of Smug Atheists. Eustace and Jill start out not believing, and work hard, and try, and fail, and learn, and in the end, they are given a reward because they did what Susan did not do.

It’s not that she didn’t believe. It’s that she knew it was real, and chose to lie about that, ridicule her brothers and sisters about their belief, and learned nothing from her Narnian experiences. She was old enough to know better. It’s not that she liked clothes, boys and parties or that she stopped believing, it’s that she was a ginormous jerk about it .

It’s not FAIR!

Yes. That’s exactly it. It’s not fair. Welcome to grownup life. Rocks fell, everyone died, and someone you cared about didn’t get to enter Aslan’s country. Hey, it’s not only eerily similar to the basic idea that when you’re grown up you don’t always get what you want, but it’s sorta just like a lot of stuff that happened in World War II. Huh. Funny, that. An overwhelming number of quite good people lost their entire families for absolutely no logical reason other than someone up and killed them. These people had to pick up and keep living their lives, denied for a time the peace of joining their families in whatever their version of the afterlife was. The reason given for her rejection in the book at least has some logic attached even if you dislike the logic used. In the real life war, there was no logic. People lost relatives because they weren’t running fast enough for cover, or because their unit was in the wrong place at the wrong time, because a gun jammed, or simply because someone else decided they didn’t deserve to live based on their last name, or religious beliefs. Susan has to wait her natural lifetime to get into Heaven? Boo. Freakin. Hoo.

Yes, it may seem like Lewis was setting Susan up for failure from the start, but on the other hand, she’s the only major character he doesn’t kill. It makes the whole thing much more complicated. She doesn’t get into Aslan’s country this time around but she has a second chance to make things right in her own world. Just like everyone else who wasn’t “lucky” enough to be killed. The others had no greater desire than to be with Aslan forever. She wanted to be grownup more than she wanted to be with Aslan. Well , she’s really going to have the chance to grow up now.

Would you rather he’d picked someone else? Edmund or Lucy would have been twice as devastating and twice as hard to justify and would have ruined the entire arc of the series. Eustace or Jill, they were too new, why introduce them only to toss them aside? Some smaller character wouldn’t have the impact. Peter was really the only other option and that just didn’t have enough set up. But someone important had to experience a permanent consequence for something because it was the freaking Apocalypse and that’s the kind of thing that happens in Apocalypti.

I think that people keep searching for reasons why it happened, searching for someone to blame, because they’re just simply upset that she was a beloved character who doesn’t get a happy ending. It’s fans trying to supply a logical reason for a visceral reaction. They need to dress up their grief over the loss of a favorite character as lofty philosophical and political arguments to avoid dealing with what’s just plain an issue of the child who first read these books being upset that Susan got written out. That’s why they act as if characters like Jill don’t even exist. It doesn’t really have much to do with sexism at all, it’s that she’s not *Susan* and they want *Susan*. The problem is that the whole thing was clumsily handled and everyone wants it to be something more than a simple case of slipshod writing.

We also need to realize that Susan may not even realize where The Friends of Narnia are. She knows her two brothers, her sister, their parents, her cousin, his not!girlfriend, an old family friend and some lady he knows, all died in a train accident. But why would she assume they were with Aslan if she no longer believes in Him? If she just thinks they’re dead due to an unfortunate accident, whether she believes in Heaven or not, can she still feel Narnia and know that they’ve gone for the last time, and without her? Or does making the choice not to believe mean that she goes on like a regular person who no longer has that option?

I’m willing to concede though that being told in PC that she could never come back may have influenced her decision to stop believing. But Peter seems to manage alright. If you want to believe, you find a way. And if you can’t find that way, you never really wanted it.

But what do I know, I’ve never been one of those who identified with Susan.