The Magician’s Nephew, by C. S. Lewis

906 Words2 Pages

The Magician’s Nephew is the genesis of Narnia. It all starts with a curious but cowardly Professor and two kids who want to find out what the Professor is doing so secretly in his lab. When they get there, the Professor tells the kids that he has found a way to travel between worlds and tricks them into trying his invention. Catastrophes and wondrous adventures follow.

The Magician’s Nephew takes place in multiple worlds. It begins in this world, in the early 1900’s, in a normal British neighborhood, in the backyard of one of the houses where a girl named Polly meets a boy named Diggory and they talk for a while until Diggory mentions that his uncle is working on a top-secret project. Diggory convinces Polly to go with him to see what the project is. When they walk into his uncle’s lab, the Professor sees the kids, shows them the rings, and tricks Polly into using one of them. Then the Professor explains to Diggory that he figured out a way to do teleportation and tells him what the rings do and how they work. “The moment you touch a yellow ring, you vanish out of this world. When you are in the Other Place I expect-of course this hasn't been tested yet, but I expect-that the moment you touch a green ring you vanish out of that world and-I expect-reappear in this,” the professor presumes (Lewis 25). He wants Diggory to be a part of his experiment to see if his theory is accurate, and Diggory realizes that if he does not go along with the Professor, Polly will be stuck in some other world. The Professor puts the rings in separate pockets and tells Diggory that he will teleport as soon as he touches one. When Diggory is ready, the Professor tells him to put his hand in the pocket were the yellow ring is. Then Diggory vanishes and...

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...hey are made to try his experiment for teleportation. The children travel to different worlds and are followed back by a witch who, after destroying her own world, wants to rule theirs. The children work together to stop the witch and send her back to her original world. Unfortunately, the place they expect to go is not where they end up, which results in the witch escaping in to the newly created world of Narnia. On the bright side, Diggory nourishes his mother back to health and plants a tree which will later be used to build a wardrobe that becomes a doorway to Narnia. Because The Magician’s Nephew is written late in the series, the reader, who already knows about Narnia, learns how Narnia came into being and how the human race became involved there.

Works Cited

Lewis, C. S. The Magician Nephew. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1970. Print.

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