Summary Of Surprised By Joy By C. S. Lewis
In Reading Autobiography: A Guide For Interpreting Life Narratives, we are asked, “What is the truth status of autobiographical disclosure? How do we know whether and when a narrator is telling the truth or lying? And what difference would that difference make?” (Smith and Watson) In this essay, I would like to briefly explore C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life with these questions in mind.
According to many Lewis’ biographers and scholars, he was a master of the “smoke screen” (Ward). Several examples can be presented: his relationship with Mrs. Moore. Was she a surrogate mother or a lover, or perhaps some mixture? Lewis completely omits her from Surprised by Joy and deletes references to her from his correspondence. Like his fellow Inkling, Charles Williams, Lewis had an obsession with sadism. He nicknamed himself “Philomastix,” lover of the whip (MacGrath). This, as well, is left …show more content…
That is, life narrators address readers whom they want to persuade of their version of experience” (Smith). Lewis is attempting to persuade his readers to see the orphan, or at least practically orphaned (because of the abandonment by his father after the death of Lewis’ mother), the schoolboy who rejects the stale faith of his father, the World War I soldier, the Oxford student who achieves a Triple First Degree, and the tutor at Magdalen College, the friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson and their conversation about Christianity and myth. And finally, to see Lewis as “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England” (Lewis). These are all, or at least mostly all, verifiable facts. But Lewis, the literary scholar, is using narrative and text as shield to hide behind and as a vehicle to assert his “version of experience”. Smith quotes from
According to many Lewis’ biographers and scholars, he was a master of the “smoke screen” (Ward). Several examples can be presented: his relationship with Mrs. Moore. Was she a surrogate mother or a lover, or perhaps some mixture? Lewis completely omits her from Surprised by Joy and deletes references to her from his correspondence. Like his fellow Inkling, Charles Williams, Lewis had an obsession with sadism. He nicknamed himself “Philomastix,” lover of the whip (MacGrath). This, as well, is left …show more content…
That is, life narrators address readers whom they want to persuade of their version of experience” (Smith). Lewis is attempting to persuade his readers to see the orphan, or at least practically orphaned (because of the abandonment by his father after the death of Lewis’ mother), the schoolboy who rejects the stale faith of his father, the World War I soldier, the Oxford student who achieves a Triple First Degree, and the tutor at Magdalen College, the friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson and their conversation about Christianity and myth. And finally, to see Lewis as “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England” (Lewis). These are all, or at least mostly all, verifiable facts. But Lewis, the literary scholar, is using narrative and text as shield to hide behind and as a vehicle to assert his “version of experience”. Smith quotes from