New Starts: Looking at the World Rightly

by Devin Brown
Near the end of chapter seven of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the narrator steps in to tell us about the change that has occurred in the formerly obnoxious Eustace.

It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that “from that time forth Eustace was a different boy.” To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.

The fiction of C. S. Lewis is replete with characters who make a 180-degree change in the direction they have been on and make a new start, but in no case does Lewis over-simplify or misrepresent the difficulty of the process. No where does Lewis suggest that change is easy or painless, or can take place without acquiring a radically new perspective.

In The Great Divorce, Lewis’s weird and wonderful ghost story, he tells the tale of a busload of departed souls who get one last chance to change the way they have been thinking and set out on a new path. In the book’s Preface, Lewis writes, “I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A wrong sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working afresh from that point, never by simply going on.”

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