[luckystarmom]

I just read this website about the order. It's interesting.

http://www.aslan.demon.co.uk/narnia.htm

[AnAmericanMother]

Very good discussion.

I happen to be one of those people who agrees with what George MacDonald remarks to the Narrator in Lewis's The Great Divorce -- when the Narrator asks him what Keats meant in a particular passage ("I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections"), MacDonald replies that he's by no means sure that Keats himself had any idea what he meant. IOW, a story grows as the writer tells it, and the act of telling it has implications that even the writer may not necessarily grasp. (R.L. Stevenson also noticed this while he was writing - he told a friend that he solved a writer's block problem by "letting the characters do what they wanted.")

I like to follow along behind the writer as he originally wrote the works. Lewis was planning to revise them (which would have made a more unified whole for the "Chronologists" as your article calls them) but he never did get around to it before his death.

[grey_whiskers]

http://www.aslan.demon.co.uk/narnia.htm

I'd be tempted to call Narnia a baptized Boxen, without the politics (no Lord Big).