The Magician's Nephew

While The Chronicles of Narnia is widely considered allegorical, C. S. Lewis explicitly stated that he did not write the seven-book series as an allegory (Mikalatos, Matt. “Neither Allegory nor Lion: Aslan and the Chronicles of Narnia.” Reactor, 30 Oct. 2019). He instead considers the series a “supposal.” To Lewis, the ideas, concepts, and even people in an allegory have direct parallels to reality that permeate the entire literary work; the genre essentially transposes something factual (or taken to be factual) into symbolic form. By contrast, a supposal begins with an act of imagination—i.e., Lewis’s question, “What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia, and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?” (Lewis, C. S. Quoted in “Neither Allegory nor Lion”). The relationship to reality is therefore both weaker and stronger than in allegory. On the one hand, the world and events of a supposal do not need to correspond exactly to those the reader knows. Parallels may exist (e.g., the Witch acting as the serpent in the Garden of Eden), but the story has its own internal logic that can deviate from that of the real world.