Tips for Teaching Literary Analysis - Character and The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

Tips for Teaching Literary Analysis - Character and The Lion

, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

Enjoying the books in The Chronicles of Narnia series takes the reader on an exciting adventure. Read slowly and studied with the help of a Narnia unit study, important literary elements can be uncovered. C.S. Lewis, masterful author thought he was, wrote with such precision that his classic series makes it easy to identify all the literary elements.

Let's look at the first key element in literature: character. By definition, a character is a person in the story. It's that simple. A character is usually a person, but could be an animal, an inanimate object, or a fantastic creature as long as he has traits which are lifelike.

Usually a story has one main character, called a protagonist. The story revolves around him. The protagonist's actions and feelings move the story along. His personal development parallels the growth of the plot. As with all books suggested in a Narnia unit study, another character typically opposes the main character and so is called the antagonist. Other smaller, secondary characters add to the story.

The richness of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe makes it difficult to pinpoint just one protagonist but I'd have to say that Aslan is the main character. That makes the choice of the antagonist easy: the White Witch. The secondary characters are therefore undoubtedly the Penvensies: Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. Smaller characters like the Beavers, Professor Kirke, and Tumnus the Faun advance the plot.

For any of the characters mentioned in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, we can describe them by asking ourselves questions found in the Narnia unit study, like:

1. What does he or she look like?

2. What does he say? Think? Feel?

3. What does he do or not do?

4. How do others respond to him?

Just like all books studied in a Narnia unit study, read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe slowly. Think about its depth of characters. Select one character and focus on him or her as you answer the questions above. Your answers are creating a character analysis.

Just as the characters oppose one another, so will your character analysis. As you work through a Narnia unit study, you'll see how much Aslan differs from the White Witch, how Lucy's faith contradicts Edmund's temptations to doubt. C.S. Lewis has definitely created fictional characters in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe which parallel real people in our lives.

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Melanie Hexter is the author of The Chronicles of Narnia unit study, a LEMILOE Publishing "Winning at Literature" comprehensive literature-based unit study that provides teachers and home school parents with a step-by-step guide for teaching literary analysis while exploring the wonders of Narnia. To learn more about this study, visit www.NarniaUnitStudy.com.

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