Hart argues that, “myth is, basically, any kind of story that succeeds in transcending the laws of mathematics, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts” (13). The mathematics of Logic in Carroll’s wonderland is, “replete with riddles and conundrums…while the little things in real life sometimes seem so overwhelming and impenetrable” (Hart 13). Lewis’s creation of Wonderland, a place where the little things CAN cause you to lose your head is, in a backhanded way telling us not to sweat the small stuff.

Manlove believed that in order “to construct plausible and moving other worlds, you must draw on the only real other world we know, that of the spirit” (98). Hart explained that, “because Lewis recognized the subtlety and complexity of the creative process, being himself a creator as well as a critic, his idea of the writer’s subordination to the force of the story, or myth, was not rigid” and he also acknowledged that they were, “varying degrees of independence in inspiration” (Hart 22). Gray is resigned to the fact that Lewis was divinely blessed based on, “various accounts which Lewis subsequently gave of his writing of the Narnia books, he emphasizes his passive role in the process. Making a story is not the best way to describe a process which for Lewis was more like bird watching” (61).

These texts are rich with references and allusions borrowed from each author’s life experience and interwoven with bits and pieces from previous works of literature. Manlove believes that, “Lewis exploits the idea that God may have created many alternative natures, to which our world would be as fantastic as theirs is to us…worlds the writer can create freely, so long as they obey their own laws” (9). Gray adds to this by saying, “for Lewis, a great advantage of the fairy tale genre is that it circumvents the overly reverential attitude of conventional religious beliefs” (61). There is a perception that Lewis’s intention was to embed veiled Christian meanings, an idea that Manlove embraces; “the crucial strength of Lewis’s Narnia books (is) that they utilize child and animal characters and the creatures of folk and fairy tale, to re-create literary traditions whose deeper meanings might otherwise be inaccessible” (7).

While Lewis would agree that there are Christian underpinnings lurking throughout Shadowlands, it is a charge he is quick to deny, “there wasn’t even anything Christian about them (Gray 61). Lewis thought imagination was a gift bestowed by God on all people. It was only natural that God’s fingerprints would be on the novels; however, it was never his intent to write a moral saga. He incorporated animals because of the image of the lion that lived in his memory since he was 16, and wrote the fairytale for his niece Lucy. That there was anything Christian at all within the story is more a byproduct of Lewis’s commitment to Christ, not the driving force behind the story.

Sammons concedes that, “Lewis certainly has a convincing way of combining their humanness with their innate animal characteristics” (99). Peter Kreeft in C.S. Lewis: A Critical Essay says “I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental. I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least” (47). Where in society can the thirst for morality so prevalent in Lion and the anarchy and chaos so prevalent in Alice be seen, and from where the balance of good and evil can be applied – that is to say, from a religious foundation and all that goes with it or from an Atheistic World view concerned with logic.

Holbrook see writing for Lewis to be a struggle against his inner self “as I have said the world of Lewis’s fantasies and his view of the ‘real’ world are paranoid-schizoid; and this suggests on ‘ontological insecurity’, to borrow R.D. Lang’s term. His fantasy worlds are full of entities which seem to be split-offs; that is, projections out of his inner world that menace and threaten to destroy the protagonists” (79).