Eustace Scrubb

Eustace Clarence Scrubb (1933 - 1949?) is a fictional character in C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. He appears in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and The Last Battle. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, he is accompanied by Edmund and Lucy Pevensie, his cousins. In The Silver Chair and The Last Battle, he is accompanied by Jill Pole, a classmate from his school.

Personality

Eustace is portrayed as what would today be called a geek, as well as a bit of a bully (when he can get away with it). It can be gathered from Eustace's behavior, and the tone that Lewis used in describing his family and school, that Lewis thought such behavior silly and disliked it a great deal. In fact, at the beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lucy and Edmund (heroes from earlier books) find Eustace unbearable and hate having to visit him and his parents, though that has mostly to do with Eustace's arrogant and unfriendly attitude. However, in the later books, Eustace is shown as an altogether better person, becoming a hero along with Jill Pole.

Biography

Prior story

Eustace was born in 1933 and is 10 years old when he appears in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. By The Last Battle he is 16 years old.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

We meet Eustace at the beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with the memorable opening line, "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." He is the only child of what Lewis describes as progressive parents, who send him to a progressive mixed school. Eustace calls his parents by their first names; his parents are vegetarians, nonsmokers, teetotallers (lifestyles which were almost unheard of in Britain during the 1940s), and wear a special kind of underclothes. At his school, the bullies are supported by the administration, and all the pupils address each other by surname only.

The narrative of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader focuses a great deal on Eustace, as he is drawn into Narnia and aboard the eponymous ship along with Lucy and Edmund. Part of the story is told from extracts of his diary, mostly to show how skewed his point of view is. He describes the ship being in a perpetual storm, regardless of the clement sailing weather and portrays the others on board as foolishly denying the supposed rough seas rather than facing the "truth" of the situation. He also complains of Lucy being given Caspian's cabin, and comments to the crew that giving girls special treatment is actually 'putting them down, and making them weaker.' Moreover, he cannot accept he is in the Narnian universe: he is continually searching for a British consulate to help the travelers out of their bind, or for a British-styled court system where he can, for example, "lodge a disposition" (or "bring an action") against Caspian for allowing Reepicheep to thrash him soundly after Eustace grabs the mouse by the tail and whirls him around, just for fun, of course.

Eustace is transformed into a dragon as the result of sleeping on a dead dragon's hoard with "greedy, dragonish thoughts" in his head (cf. Fafnir). Upon return to the Dawn Treader, he is nearly attacked by the crew until Lucy asks if he is Eustace, to which he vigorously nods his head. Being a dragon changes Eustace; instead of his usual sulky self, he assists the travellers with food, shelter, and a tree to serve as a new mainmast. The problem comes when it is time to leave the island, as the ship cannot hold or maintain a dragon. Reepicheep displays sympathy to Eustace's plight despite the boy's prior cruelty to the mouse and they eventually become friends.

Eventually, Eustace encounters Aslan and returns to human form. Returning to camp, Eustace meets Edmund who shares his own redemption story, remarking that "you were only an ass, but I was a traitor." After this, Eustace improves, though he still exhibits some bad habits. When Eustace returns home after his adventures, his mother thinks he has become tiresome and commonplace, blaming her son's change on the influence of "those Pevensie children"; in spite of everyone else remarking on how he had improved and "you would never know him for the same boy".

The Silver Chair

In his second appearance, Eustace returns to his progressive school where he is now labelled a misfit, due to the changes wrought in him during The Voyage of The Dawn Treader. He befriends fellow misfit Jill Pole, and their joint desire to leave the school draws them into Narnia. This unlikely friendship (given that Eustace had previously bullied Jill before his previous experience in Narnia) is strengthened considerably throughout the story. The two journey through Narnia to recover the lost heir to the throne and also thwart the overthrow of the kingdom by the evil Green Witch. Though he still has his faults (mainly stubbornness and rash decision-making), Eustace (now more commonly called Scrubb) displays little of his former odiousness, and he and Jill begin to develop a gradual, but definite, sense of affection towards one another. He wholeheartedly rejects the insipid philosophy offered by the Green Witch in favour of the Narnian values he has grown to love. He helps Prince Rilian to escape the underworld and return to Narnia just in time to meet his father before he dies. Eustace then meets Caspian in Aslan's Country.

The Last Battle

He and Jill were sent to Narnia shortly before its destruction to attempt to help the king rally supporters for one last battle to regain Narnia. As one of the "friends of Narnia" from Earth, who still believed in Narnia and followed the principles of that world and of Aslan, Eustace was spared from the end of Narnia and brought into Aslan's country to live out the rest of eternity in happiness. It is not made clear if Eustace and Jill came to Narnia because they died in the train crash that is known to have killed everyone else or if Aslan simply transported them to Narnia.

Christian similarities

Eustace is perhaps an allegory for Saul of Tarsus. Eustace was not one of the original disciples of Aslan and did not meet him the first time he came into the world. He persecuted the followers of Aslan until the scales were removed from his eyes.

The character may also be partly a self-portrait. The names "Eustace Clarence" are intended to sound recherché and repellent, and Lewis is known to have disliked his own names "Clive Staples" and insisted on being addressed as "Jack" . Lewis was also a late convert to Christianity, and commended it for making a "twentieth-century academic prig like me" see a wider view of the world.

Many critics are offended by the description of Eustace and his family, and regard it as evidence of Lewis' anti-intellectual and anti-progressive leanings. In Lewis' essay The Abolition of Man, he complains that modern education is producing "men without chests" -- people whose lives are divided between the purely cerebral and the purely visceral, without any middle ground of sentiment or imagination -- and Eustace (in his initial state) is clearly intended to be one of these. In the same essay, however, Lewis denies the suggestion that he is attacking intellect as such, and in his book on Miracles he even argues for the scholastic belief that the intellect is our participation in the supernatural world. Similarly, he was not against progress in the sense of objectively justifiable social improvement, but did oppose purely fashionable progressivism, and in particular what he called "chronological snobbery", the view that the superiority of modern values can always be assumed automatically and without investigation.

Portrayal

In the BBC production, Eustace was portrayed by David Thwaites.

On April 1, 2008 several Narnia websites stated that Zac Efron would play Eustace in the upcoming movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but this was revealed to be an April Fool's hoax.

On June 20, 2008, it was revealed that William Poulter will play Eustace in the upcoming Narnia film.

References

*

• Goldthwaite, John, The Natural History of Make-believe: A Guide to the Principal Works of Britain, Europe and America: OUP 1996, ISBN-10: 0195038061, ISBN-13: 978-0195038064