Happy Endings in Narnia

[Swanwhite]

Tolkien invented the term eucatastrophe ("good catastrophe") to mean: "a sudden turn of events at the end of a story which ensures that the protagonist does not meet some terrible, impending, and very plausible and probable doom."

I've been thinking about how gloriously each of the Chronicles concludes and how Lewis takes his time to describe splendours for us at the end of each book. Eucatastrophe isn't always the right term for it, but often there is feasting and celebration, people returning to life from death or near death, and other remarkable elements of joy. The film adaptations almost always cut or downplay these aspects.

The celebration plays out differently in each book.

LWW gives us feasting and celebration, the coronation and presenting of honours to all the key characters, and the dawn of the Golden Age in Narnia. (And perhaps the thing I'm thinking of isn't just the ending but also the coming of Father Christmas and the melting of the winter and all the outpouring of joy and restoration)

PC has a long sequence of the wildness and mirth returning to Narnia with Bacchus and Silenus and Aslan's parade across the country even before the battle is over, and then the feasting into the night under the full moon.

VDT is more of a crescendo where each island becomes more magical than the one before until Ramandu's island of which Edmund later says that seeing the sunrise while Ramandu and his daughter sing was actually the most exciting part of the adventure. The story continues to rise in glory and intensity, with the increasing light, and drinking the sweet water and sailing through the silver sea till they reach the end of the world and meet Aslan there.

And perhaps I'll come back and fill in my thoughts on the other four later, but now I'm curious about your thoughts on the endings? What stands out about them to you? Why do you think they were meaningful to Lewis and why you think they get cut short in adaptation?

[knightofnarnia]

For Prince Caspian the answer is obvious, Bacchus and Silenus feasting wouldn't be children friendly. It seems to me that LWW the film acctually hints at a celebration in honor of the crownation. As for Voyage of the Dawn Treader I guess Douglass Gresham had enough of a fight to ensure that they mention that Aslan is on Earth too and has another name to care much about Ramandu's island.

[hobbit_of_narnia]

I assumed it was because going into detail about the happy endings takes up a lot of screen time, which you can afford in a longer movie with a simple storyline, but the more details there are in the storyline the more you have to cut some of the happy stuff, I guess?

[Ariel.of.Narnia]

I think part of the exclusion in the Waldens is because of story flow. They did film a celebration for LWW (dancing, at any rate), but it doesn’t even appear in the extended edition. My guess is that they thought it interrupted the flow, since they did have to proceed to “not safe, but good” and the White Stag.

PC changed so much that there wouldn’t have been a place for the romp, for screentime and thematic purposes. They could have had the great feast (even with the exclusion of Bacchus and Silenus (as the non-book readers in the audience would want some kind of explanation for them)), but that again might have interrupted the flow from victory to Caspian’s coronation and the door in the air.

VDT also changed so much that the “slow crescendo”, as Swan put it, simply doesn’t exist. The quest is all about the seven lords and their seven swords; when Reep discovers the water is sweet and he points out the Silver Sea, Edmund literally says, “Well, we’ve come this far.” Like Aslan’s Country is merely a side-quest that would be nice to do, if convenient. So it’s very, “Yay we defeated the green mist, hey, let’s check out the end of the world ‘cause we deserve a break, oh, whoop, looks like we’re all saying goodbye now.”

Perhaps with some shift in focus, the movies could have retained those celebrations as part of the main theme(s). That said, I can’t think of any movie celebrations that last all that long. Not even Return of the King went into party mode, opting for a more solemn sort of celebration that was character-centric (in particular, Aragorn coming into his own as king and the Hobbits coming home to normal life but as people who’ve experienced extraordinary things). I wonder if this is because the average moviegoer would be lost in the midst of a long party scene that (unlike Bilbo’s party) doesn’t set up anything (eg: conflict, characters, plot points), or because moviemakers only think they’d lose the audience with long parties to celebrate the end of all things), and thus we end up with victories with short happy endings.
Never really thought about it before, so these are my current thoughts on the subject.

[jasmine_tarkheena]

A lot of fairy tales start with "Once Upon A Time" and end with "And they live happily ever after."

The Narnia books don't necessarily start with "Once upon a time." Hey, in my fanfic of The Last Battle, I didn't even start with "Once upon a time" because it almost sounds too cliche. However, in The Last Battle, there is this last line-

And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Now I'm not going to say if I'm going to end my fanfic with "And they live happily ever after." It's too early to decide on that yet.