The Horse And His Boy

One symbol that Lewis uses to demonstrate the glory, power, and regal bearing of his Christ figure throughout the Narnian books is the depiction of Aslan as a lion. This would be a particularly appealing and obvious connection for his primary audience, British schoolchildren, since the lion has been the symbol of English royalty for centuries. In describing Aslan as the largest, grandest, and most awe-inspiring of lions, he is further developing the idea of Christ’s grandeur.

Since it is characteristic of Lewis to provide contrasts in every aspect of his stories, in the final chapter of the book he transforms Rabadash, the Calormen crown prince into a donkey, a braying symbol of that which is brash, annoying, and ridiculous, the exact opposite of the great Aslan. Contrasting the powerless donkey to the all-powerful lion for Lewis is an ultimate statement of Christ’s immense power.

Lewis uses various incidences of darkness versus lightness to express that lightness equals trustworthy goodness and darkness equals all manner of negativity. One interesting example of this is the colloquial saying Lewis imparts to the Calormenes to express the presence of a negative emotion. As Aravis says when she finds out she has been betrothed to marry Ahosta, “When this news was brought to me, the sun appeared dark in my eyes” (38). Lewis has even the Calormenes use this convention: some news is so bad that even the brightest light seems dark.

Another scene in which Lewis contrasts light versus darkness to portray true goodness appears in Chapters 11 and 12 where Shasta walks in a completely dark fog on a mountain pass alongside Aslan. As Aslan slowly reveals himself as a divine, benevolent force, the dark fog begins to lift. When at last Shasta sees the lion, the light around him is shimmering bright, even after Aslan suddenly disappears—which is an allegorical reference to the ascension of the risen Christ in the biblical book Acts of the Apostles 1:9.

Problematically, Lewis’s symbolic use of light and dark extends to the characters’ skin color. He continually depicts the fair-skinned, blonde northerners as being virtuous, while characters with darker skin are depicted as antagonists.