SOURCE: "Platonic Shadows in C. S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicles," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 75-87.

In the following essay, Johnson and Houtman examine references to the philosophical investigations of Plato in Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. According to the critics, Lewis frequently incorporates Platonic concepts found in The Republic, in particular the famous Allegory of the Cave.

As a literary critic, science fiction writer, Christian apologist, and creator of the Chronicles of Narnia, in the last several decades C. S. Lewis has attained a reputation and following enviable in size and amazing in diversity. In many ways the quiet Oxbridge professor's achievements have assumed an air of authority, an aura of credibility, difficult to explain; Lewis, after all, is not an "apologist" in the same sense as Merton, nor a critic with a comprehensive system such as McLuhan. He is not, likewise, a fiction writer whose...