"Well, don't let's talk about that now," said Peter

[rj_anderson]

I love that people are still weighing in with comments on my Problem of Susan essay over three years after it was written. Warms the cockles of my heart, it does

Comments

[dichroic]

My vote for the mirror image of Susan is the Susan in Swallows and Amazons. That Susan is also the nervous older ister with adult-ish worries, and it's exactly because of her (this is said explicitly at least once per book) that the whole group get to go on adventures - because the Mothers trust Susan to be sure people don't do stupidly dangerous things, and that they get enough sleep and food. When on an adventure, Susan has the sailing / woodcraft skills to be respected by the rest, and when the younger ones do do something stupid and dangerous, it's Susan's upset they worry about. ("Nothing ever ought to happen to make Susan look like that.")

[spritl]

My objection is that the last word on Susan is not the same as Aslan's judgment of her in Prince Caspian -- "You have been listening to fears, my child"
...
In fact, it's the Dwarfs' presence in the narrative that makes the dismissal of Susan so frustrating: they get to be tragic, Susan gets to be merely a caricature. Lucy has compassion for them as she hasn't for Susan, and if Aslan had been standing right there I doubt he'd have allowed her to get away with that.

I'm sorry to jump in here after over a year but I just had to respond to this:

Lewis doesn't ever give the "last word" on Susan. Susan isn't dead. It's a very hard point to grasp, from what I've noticed, but that's where all the argument against Susan's "treatment" falls apart. She's not a tragic figure. She still has the rest of her life to find her way back to Aslan, if she so chooses. There is no final word on Susan because her story has not endedThe dwarfs, on the other hand, are tragic because they are dead. They are stuck in their limbo - not in Hell, but not

[serenasnape]

Wow. I'd never really spotted that either (just to echo everybody else). Very sad, I think.

[greenhornet]

however did I miss that?

absolutely right!

[anonymous]

I never considered that either. How could we ALL miss this fact?

Re: absolutely right!

[jade_eyed_angel]

Jumping on this something like 3 years later as I just finished reading the series (at least for the first time as an adult), and everything else aside, the problem of Susan really bothers me. I did read your other post first and I'm pretty sure her exclusion did have something to do with not believing in Narnia more than anything else (from the way it's written anyway), but aside from the fact that Lewis actually gave his characters a "happy ending" by killing them all off, which I find a little disturbing honestly, even if they didn't realize right away that they were dead there was still a good half a page left after Aslan informed them about it