The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”

The novel’s opening sentence introduces one of the protagonists as an antihero, with the narrator mocking the boy’s seemingly unfortunate name before the character is even properly introduced. This somewhat scornful comment establishes the omniscient and moralistic quality of the narrator’s voice, and conditions the reader to expect frequent interjections of Lewis’s light-hearted humor and moralistic judgments as the novel progresses.

“Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.”

The narrator continues his humorous and somewhat irreverent description of Eustace Scrubb by first introducing familiar elements with which young readers can easily identify (such as liking animals and books), then twisting those elements into a distinctly unlikable form (such as being cruel to animals and preferring boring books). This early characterization presents Eustace as a distinctly unpleasant character and foreshadows his eventual redemption when his experiences in Narnia finally allow him to find and strengthen his hidden qualities of goodness and courage.

“Peter was working very hard for an exam and he was to spend the holidays being coached by old Professor Kirke in whose house these four children had had wonderful adventures long ago in the war years. If he had still been in that house he would have had them all to stay. But he had somehow become poor since the old days and was living in a small cottage with only one bedroom to spare. It would have cost too much money to take the other three all to America, and Susan had gone.”

In an offhand way, this passage establishes a link between the previous installments in The Chronicles of Narnia series and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. While the first two books focused on all four of the Pevensie children, this novel only includes the youngest ones as well as introducing their cousin Eustace.