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Imagination and fantasy are both an important, if not necessary aspect of a healthy productive mind. Amid ever increasing tumult and days of uncertainty, the need for diversion from daily travails in an attempt to refresh and renew ones’ constitution, is more important than ever. What better way to satisfy the need for escape than with a good book. One that transforms who you are by what it is and what it has to say. C.S. Lewis repeatedly made reference to the significance of “imagination” in his writings. As Peter Schakel explains, in his book Imagination and the Arts in C.S. Lewis, “it would not be too much to say that imagination is, except for salvation, the most important issue in Lewis’s thought and life” (2).

Schakel conveys how Lewis remained committed to the idea that, “a healthy imagination in adults and children is vital because of…the enrichment of life it offers, and…the potential it holds for the deepening of faith and understanding,” something Lewis understood as a Christian, since so much is predicated on believing what cannot be seen (2). Lewis’s command of imagery was so pronounced in the Narnia series of books that, according to Martha Sammons in A Guide through Narnia,

Lewis urged other ways of looking at and seeing the world as Doris Myers in C.S. Lewis in Context explains, “Lewis says that what he seeks in…fantasy is a new ‘quality’ or ‘flavour,’ an expansion of consciousness through “sensations we never had before” (38). Lewis sought to do with writing what his predecessor Lewis Carroll did nearly a half century before, as explained by Phyllis Reinstein in her book, Alice in Context, which discusses the creation of something new out of something established as demonstrated in Carroll’s Alice books which themselves are “clearly different from their contemporaries and predecessors, regarded in certain light they are dependent on other children’s fiction” (175).

To accurately recognize and appreciate Carroll’s frontier spirit attitude toward writing Alice in Wonderland, “one must see (Alice in Wonderland) in the context of nineteenth century children’s literature. Only then can Carroll’s innovations, inversions, and borrowings be evaluated” (Reinstein 175). Likewise Lewis enjoyed the same freedom, gleaning from previous works, ideas and conventions while adding to and manipulating them to suit his needs. For example, the wardrobe Lucy enters is a passage to another reality, a portal to an otherworld that she, much like Alice, who while chasing the rabbit fell into the hole, must navigate and assimilate to.

This is demonstrated in the beginning of Alice in Wonderland when, through no fault of her own Alice suddenly finds her world and reality transformed, “down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again” (Carroll 8). The passageway found in the Wardrobe that leads to Narnia, juxtaposed to Carroll’s Alice entering the rabbit hole are moments of enchantment that not only provide the characters a means of entry into the otherworld, but provide the reader with a means to enter the story.

Who would’ve thought that something as innocuous as a wardrobe would evoke such a resounding amount of emotion and love for a world that lives, perchance, if we are lucky or cursed, just beyond our own wardrobe or mirror? According to William Gray in his critical essay book C.S. Lewis, “the question which dominates the early chapters of LWW is the very existence of Narnia. Lucy’s first stumbling into Narnia through the wardrobe is a moment of real magic, equal to anything in…Lewis Carroll” (63). Gray’s admiration is clearly for Lewis’s style of welcoming the reader into the narrative.