Devin Brown is a Professor of English at Asbury University and the author of Inside Narnia (2005), Inside Prince Caspian (2008), and Inside the Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010). He is also a member of the advisory board for and a contributor to The C. S. Lewis Bible (2010).

C. S. Lewis has stated that his main focus in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was “the spiritual life.” The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is perhaps the most theological of the seven Chronicles of Narnia, as various critical milestones in the life of the believer can be seen through its cast of characters.

For Eustace, someone at the very start of the spiritual life, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a love story. Not involving the romantic love like Caspian will come to know on this voyage as he meets his future bride, but love in the sense of “while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”

There is little to love about Eustace at the start of the adventure. When we first meet him, he is pretentious, selfish, and very worldly. He is on a self-seeking path that will lead to only misery and isolation. But Aslan’s grace and mercy will offer Eustace an invitation to change the road he’s on. When Eustace finally sees himself as he really is, sees that he’s not the person he thought he was, Aslan will offer to remove his old nature and give him a new one. After undergoing real repentance, Eustace will find real transformation—not through any actions of his own but by simply accepting the gift of deliverance Aslan extends.

For Caspian The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a story about duty, obedience, sacrifice, and faithfulness. In the end, Caspian will receive the Narnian equivalent of “well done, my good and faithful servant” but not without having to struggle with temptation and with the need to surrender his will to Aslan’s will at several key moments long the way.

Lucy, too, has her own struggles with temptation and her own lessons to learn from Aslan—lessons about what real beauty is and real friendship.

Finally for Reepicheep The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is about longing and fulfillment as he travels to a place beyond personal honor, to the place he has been seeking all his life. In the previous story, Reepicheep claimed that a tail was “the honor and glory” of a mouse. Here in his quest for Aslan’s Country, he will find a much higher honor and a far greater glory.

During C. S. Lewis’s childhood, ideas associated with God and Christ came to take on negative “stained-glass and Sunday school associations,” causing his own faith to become “paralyzed” for many years. It was not until his thirties that he “gave in, and admitted that God was God.”

Years later in writing the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis hoped to cast “all these things into an imaginary world” where they could “for the first time appear in their real potency”—completely free from any off-putting connections. As Stephen Smith has proposed, through these stories Lewis intends “to awaken in us a hunger” and “to open our hearts to the reality of God as the one in whom power and goodness, majesty and compassion meet.”

In the end Aslan will tell Edmund and Lucy, this is the very reason you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better in your world. Through The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we, too learn important lessons about the spiritual life. Through Lewis’s story of the great lion, audiences will come to better know our own King of Kings.