The Chronicles of Narnia - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — Chapter 6

Narration Prompt

Summarize the chapter's narrative arc, then identify the central tension and evaluate whether the author handles it honestly.

Discussion Questions

1. The Witch's notice transforms an act of mercy — giving tea to a lost child — into the capital crime of High Treason for comforting the Queen's enemies. Lewis was writing four years after Nuremberg. Evaluate whether the notice functions as Lewis's deliberate engagement with the problem of legalized persecution — the use of law as an instrument of injustice — or whether it is simply a genre convention of fairy-tale tyranny that happens to resonate with historical parallels.
2. Lewis structures the chapter as a return to a known space — Tumnus's cave, last seen in Chapter 2 as warm and welcoming, now cold, ransacked, and marked by an official notice. Evaluate this technique of narrative return as a form of moral argument. What can a transformed familiar space communicate about the cost of virtue that a new setting or a verbal report cannot?

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