The reason why the children were brought to Narnia

     "Please Aslan, before we go, will you tell us when we can come back to Narnia again? Please. And oh, do, do, do, make it soon."
    "Dearest," said Aslan very gently, "you and your brother will never come back to Narnia."
    "Oh, Aslan!!" said Edmund and Lucy both together in despairing voices.
    "You are too old, children," said Aslan, "and you must begin to come close to your own world now."
    "It isn't Narnia, you know," sobbed Lucy. "It's you. We shan't meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?"
    "But you shall meet me, dear one," said Aslan.
    "Are — are you there too, Sir?" said Edmund.
    "I am," said Aslan. "But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there."

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952; this edition: HarperCollins, 1994) 247.

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“I have been here all the time” — Aslan

    “Oh, Aslan,” said she, “it was kind of you to come.”
    “I have been here all the time,” said he, “but you have just made me visible.”
    “Aslan!” said Lucy almost a little reproachfully. “Don’t make fun of me. As if anything I could do would make you visible!”
    “It did,” said Aslan. “Do you think I wouldn’t obey my own rules?”
    After a little pause he spoke again.
    “Child,” he said, “I think you have been eavesdropping.”
    “Eavesdropping?”
    “You listened to what your two schoolfellows were saying about you.”
    “Oh that? I never thought that was eavesdropping, Aslan. Wasn’t it magic?”
    “Spying on people by magic is the same as spying on them in any other way. And you have misjudged your friend. She is weak, but she loves you. She was afraid of the older girl and said what she does not mean.”
    “I don’t think I’d ever be able to forget what I heard her say.”
    “No, you won’t.”
    “Oh dear,” said Lucy. “Have I spoiled everything? Do you mean we would have gone on being friends if it hadn’t been for this—and been really great friends—all our lives perhaps—and now we never shall.”
    “Child,” said Aslan, “did I not explain to you once before that no one is ever told what would have happened?”
    “Yes, Aslan, you did,” said Lucy. “I’m sorry.

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952; this edition: HarperCollins, 1994) 158-160.

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Who is Aslan? (Edmund’s answer)

    "But who is Aslan? Do you know him?"
    "Well — he knows me," said Edmund. “He is the great Lion, the son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea, who saved me and saved Narnia. We’ve all seen him. Lucy sees him most often. And it may be Aslan’s country we are sailing to.”

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952; this edition: HarperCollins, 1994) 110-111.

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The danger of sleeping with greedy, dragonish thoughts

[Eustace] had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself…. As for the pain in his left arm (or what had been his left arm) he could now see what had happened by squinting with his left eye. The bracelet which had fitted very nicely on the upper arm of a boy was far too small for the thick, stumpy foreleg of a dragon. It had sunk deeply into his scaly flesh and there was a throbbing bulge on each side of’ it. He tore at the place with his dragon’s teeth but could not get it off. 
     In spite of the pain, his first feeling was one of relief. There was nothing to be afraid of any more. He was a terror himself now and nothing in the world but a knight (and not all of those) would dare to attack him. He could get even with Caspian and Edmund now—
    But the moment he thought this he realized that he didn’t want to. He wanted to be friends. He wanted to get back among humans and talk and laugh and share things. He realized that he was a monster cut off from the whole human race. An appalling loneliness came over him. He began to see that the others had not really been fiends at all. He began to wonder if he himself had been such a nice person as he had always supposed. He longed for their voices. He would have been grateful for a kind word even from Reepicheep.
    When he thought of this the poor dragon that had been Eustace lifted up its voice and wept. A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952; this edition: HarperCollins, 1994) 91-92.

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Could you ever sail to Aslan’s Country?

    “And where are we heading for?” asked Edmund.
    “Well,” said Caspian, “that’s rather a long story. Perhaps you remember that when I was a child my usurping uncle Miraz got rid of seven friends of my father’s (who might have taken my part) by sending them off to explore the unknown Eastern Seas beyond the Lone Islands.”
    “Yes,” said Lucy, “and none of them ever came back.”
    “Right. Well, on my coronation day, with Aslan’s approval, I swore an oath that, if once I established peace in Narnia, I would sail east myself for a year and a day to find my father’s friends or to learn of their deaths and avenge them if I could. These were their names: the Lord Revilian, the Lord Bern, the Lord Argoz, the Lord Mavramorn, the Lord Octesian, the Lord Restimar, and—oh, that other one who’s so hard to remember.”
    “The Lord Rhoop, Sire,” said Drinian.
    “Rhoop, Rhoop, of course,” said Caspian. “That is my main intention. But Reepicheep here has an even higher hope.” Everyone’s eyes turned to the Mouse.
    “As high as my spirit,” it said. “Though perhaps as small as my stature. Why should we not come to the very eastern end of the world? And what might we find there? I expect to find Asian’s own country. It is always from the east, across the sea, that the great Lion comes to us.”
    “I say, that is an idea,” said Edmund in an awed voice.
    “But do you think,” said Lucy, “Aslan’s country would be that sort of country—I mean, the sort you could ever sail to?”

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952; this edition: HarperCollins, 1994) 20-21.

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Another Chronicle of Narnia begins

There was once a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. He didn't call his Father and Mother "Father" and "Mother", but Harold and Alberta. They [his family] were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and tee-totallers, and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on beds and the windows were always open.
    Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on  a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.
    Eustace Clarence disliked his cousins the four Pevensies, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. But he was quite glad when he heard that Edmund and Lucy were coming to stay. For deep down inside him he like bossing and bullying; and, though he was a puny little person who couldn’t have stood up even to Lucy, let alone Edmund, in a fight, he knew that there are dozens of ways to give people a bad time if you are in your own home and they are only visitors.

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952; this edition: HarperCollins, 1994) 3-4.

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