It’s critically important to recognize that Aslan never rejected Susan. Susan rejected Aslan. And it’s especially silly why she rejected Him: She wants to be popular, and desired, and such, but she’s already achieved all that she’s aspiring to: She has had, quite literally, the experience of being the most popular and desired woman in the world. One would think that that experience would have been enough for her to outgrow childish notions about popularity.
At the risk of sounding like I’m Pitting you… that’s a very poor attitude. Yeah, I can understand in the first stages of grief being angry and confused. It happens to the best of us.
People die. That’s basically the entire reason and point and worldview of religion. If you’re not willing to accept that people get sick, murder, or slack off train maintenance (or maybe make the foolish mistake of riding British trains 
), then you may have unrealistic expectations. Heck, in Christianity, even the suggestion that we complain about it was enough to make God a little pissed. We are told that the method of dying doesn’t matter much. Gaimen’s Susan was monstrously self-absorbed and chiefly concerned with herself. She chose to stay behind, and then got whiny about the consequences.
Heck, she should be grateful at living even as she grieves for the dead. God granted her a long and hopefully happy life, with children, a family, Christmases, and so forth. Heaven, after all, is patient.
When you title something The Last Battle and say that someone isn’t part of it, it’s hard to see that they may be part of it in the future. It’s the “last” battle. Not the “next to last.”
So, that’s how I read it as well. Susan is out; you guys are in. Sucks to be stupid Susan. Now let’s celebrate!
It’s the last battle in Narnia, but our world goes on. She still has hope of reaching grace through any of the many other routes available to us.
I can well imagine that Susan is going to be pretty devastated at losing her siblings and parents all at once. However, she’s living in post-WWII Britain; she’s not alone in having lost a lot. Everyone around her has been through a lot too. C. S. Lewis fought in WWI and lived through WWII–I don’t think he’s unsympathetic.
Chronos’ bit about popularity is bang on, IMO.
Since we’re talking about Narnia, then it’s relevant that she’s no longer a part of it. The characters at the end of The Last Battle go to paradise, and Susan isn’t there. There’s no hint that Susan will ever be there. She missed the train. Saying “Oh, she can still get to heaven!” is non-responsive since we’re not dealing with “real” heaven or “real” Christianity. We’re dealing with a fictional universe where only what Lewis says exists.
:dubious: That doesn’t make any sense. Aslan says straight out that the whole point of going to Narnia is so that the characters will learn to know him better in their own world. Thus part of what “Lewis says exists” is our own world and our own chances at redemption.
jsgoddess, I’m of two minds on this issue.
On the one hand, even though the pre-stable events of the last battle involve only the end of time of the Pevensie’s adopted home, not their birthplace, it’s possible that by the “time” they got to Aslan’s country/Heaven, Earth had ended as well. When Lucy & the others watch the end of Narnia, the omniscient narrator makes a point of observing that time seemed to be passing differently than otherwise; I think many years–perhaps eons–went by on Narnia’s Earth. I expect that Lewis would say that Heaven, being eternal, is outside the bounds of ordinary time. Everyone who goes there arrives at the same “moment” because for Lewis, eternity is an infinitely prolonged, infinitely deep moment. Susan’s absence when the Pevensies arrive, in this context, is probably permanent. Moreover, although the stories are not allegorical, they are didactic, and I think Lewis would have felt it necessary for the terms of his lesson that at least one of his protagonists not be saved in the end, if only because, if ALL of them are saved, then it seems to imply a dearth of free will in his universe. If no one ever rejects God, perhaps it is because God does not permit himself to be rejected.
On the other hand–as I wrote upthread, Susan definitely does not die with her family in the train crash, and the notion of eternal time being qualitatively different from mortal time isn’t necessarily applicable to Narnia. I like to think that Lewis intended for Susan to come around in time.
A question: assuming that I am right that Lewis felt obliged to have one of his child protagonists not make it to Heaven, what would have been a more satisfying way for that to happen?
Ok, but then what the creator of that world has said is relevant “Here’s what CS Lewis said “”*The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there’s plenty of time for her to mend and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end…in her own way.” * That’s what Lewis sez.
We can think it, but that doesn’t make the rules of Christian theology apply. It’s a fictional world, so we don’t get to say, “Oh, that’s OUR world, so these other rules are going to apply when I want them to.” It’s fiction. I get to read it, too, not just believers.
I agree with you about the temporal issues of heaven, as well.
Actually, the novel doesn’t exactly describe what they find in heaven, nor the temporal mechanics thereof. It doesn’t quit end when they stop living, but it does end at the point they go on to the afterlife.
That’s fine, but the author explicitly described it as emcompassing that. If you want to ignore or cut it out, you’re just making your own story to suit yourself. Which you can do, but don’t complain that people on semi-anonymnous messageboards don’t agree with your personal canon.
Unless Lewis broke the fourth wall, which I don’t recall but it’s been a while, he didn’t address anything about my world.
If it didn’t happen in the text, it didn’t happen.
I used to feel the same way, but, as I have gotten older, LB has moved up, to the point where it is my second favorite after DT. Why? Because it is so damned joyous!
And, I suspect that joyous is exactly the word that Lewis would use to describe it.
I never thought Dumbledore was gay either.
This point is arguable (it ultimately gets down to the whole Is Religion Correct question that they’ve been hashing over in GD since time immemorial), but even if Lewis didn’t say anything about your world, he certainly said things about Susan’s world. According to the canon of the Narnia books, it is possible to reach Aslan’s realm without going through Narnia. Narnia is gone, so it is no longer possible for Susan (or anyone else) to go to Narnia, so in that sense, yes, she missed the train, but there are still other trains, and it remains to be seen whether she’ll catch any of those.
I disagree that it’s no longer possible for someone from the Pevensie’s homeworld to reach Narnia. Narnian time isn’t more compessed than Pevensie-Earth time; it’s disjoint. The pirates who were the ancestors of the Telmarines existed on Pevensie-Earth before Digory Kirke was born, but though Digory Kirke was present at Narnia’s birth, they nevertheless arrived in Narnia hundreds of years after the Pevensies’ reign there.
And in fact the remaining Pevensies are in the real, eternal Narnia, and they can see the real, eternal England from where they are with their new, Heaven-sent sight, and all it takes to get from one to the other is time and patience, which all present have an infinite supply of.
I have not read The Problem of Susan, but I’ve had it summarised for me by someone who knows it well (I went to a Gaiman board three or four years ago and made a nuisance of myself until someone kindly satisfied my curiosity). I prefer my own fan-fic on what eventually happened to Susan, available to any interested parties on request. Someone on the Narnia fans board was kind enough to say he and his wife now consider it canon.
Ah, good point. I couldn’t think of any cases where the mapping was non-monotonic, but you’re right about that one. So it probably is still possible for Earth humans to reach Narnia, though I suspect that it isn’t for Susan specifically.
In The Magician’s Nephew, Digory Kirke’s (the future Professor) mother is dying. He and his friend Polly stumble onto his magician Uncle Andrew’s study; the uncle tricks them into using his experiment magic rings which transport them into an in-between world where they can access many other worlds. They accidentally bring Jadis from her dying world into London. While attemping to undo their mistake, they bring Jadis, a cabby, a horse, and the uncle into Narnia before it is created.
They witness Aslan creating Narnia; the lamppost from LWW is planted; Digory fetches a magic apple from a magic orchard to attone for bringing Jadis into Narnia. The apple grows into a tree, and Aslan gives Digory one of its fruit to cure his mother.
Digory, Polly, and the uncle return with the rings, and Digory saves his mother with the apple.
And then plants a seed from the core of that apple, and eventually makes a wardrobe out of the wood of that tree.