The Horse and His Boy | Chapter 9: Across the Desert

Chapter Summary:

The chapter begins with Aravis and Lasaraleen in the room alone after the Tisroc has left. Lasaraleen is shaken from the experience, but Aravis insists that she take her to the river immediately. Lasaraleen does so, and the two part ways. Aravis heads toward the Tombs, where she finds a servant of Lasaraleen watching over Bree and Hwin. As soon as she tells the servant to leave her with the horses, Shasta appears; the four are finally reunited.

Aravis tells Shasta about Prince Rabadash's plan to invade Archenland, so they begin a march across the desert immediately. They walk all night and all of the next day through the vast and flat desert. Finally, after sunset on the second day they see a slope ahead and make toward it. A path emerges between cliffs on either side. They see a river, stop for water, and accidentally sleep for many hours. Shasta is concerned about keeping ahead of Prince Rabadash, but the horses don't seem to be in much of a hurry, and insist on eating before carrying on with their march.

Reflection:

I believe this is my shortest chapter summary to date in TCON series. This is largely because a majority of the chapter is spent marching across the desert, with a great deal of sensory descriptions and imagery along the way (the heat, the flatness, the rising and setting of the sun, the monotony, and so forth). Indeed, C.S. Lewis ironically makes the reader really feel how boring and monotonous the march is--because the text accompanying it is rather the same. This is not criticism at all; I think it was the best thing that C.S. Lewis could do to build empathy with the characters who were actually making that march across the desert. Those might be a boring and tiresome two pages, but certainly less so than a 36-hour walk across a desert.

But I don't think I'm going to be discussing the scenery and whatnot during today's discussion. Instead, I'm going to focus on a particular passage toward the end of this chapter. Here's the context: Shasta, Aravis, Bree, and Hwin have just awoken from their unintentional slumber. Aravis is upset with herself for not realizing that they were in danger of falling asleep, and Shasta is anxious to move on. Bree and Hwin are both tired, and feel like they need to eat before moving on. Here is the conversation (and narration) that occurs:

"'I feel just like Free that I can't go on. But when Horses have humans ... on their backs, aren't they often made to go on when they're feeling like this? And then they find they can... oughtn't we to be able to do even more, now that we're free? It's all for Narnia.' 

'I think, Ma'am,' said Bree very crushingly, 'that I know a little more about campaigns and forced marches and what a horse can stand than you do.' 

To this, Hwin made no answer ... In reality she was quite right, and if Bree had had a Tarkaan on his back at that very moment to make him go on, he would have found that he was good for several hours' hard going. But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself" (p. 182).

It's that last paragraph and especially the last sentence that really stood out to me as the point for reflection/discussion of this chapter. So, here we have two assertions from C.S. Lewis, or our narrator, and they are as follows: (I'm obviously paraphrasing here)

1) Motivation--knowing that you have no choice--is motivation enough to keep you going.
2) Freed slaves have no motivation because they have had external motivation for so long that they no longer can create internal motivation within themselves.

Interesting notions; let's take them one at a time.

First--our narrator says that the motivation of knowing that you have no choice is enough to keep you going more than no motivation at all. I think in some ways this is true. Give me an 8-hour work day with 1 small task to accomplish, and I will limp through that task like it's the greatest struggle of my life. Give me a list of 25 manageable tasks to accomplish in that same time period, and I will be working on them constantly, all day, until they are done. And damn if I don't feel accomplished when they are done. But I think that the narrator is correct here only until a certain extent. While Hwin is correct--that they probably could have gone further if they were required to--this is not always healthy or sustainable. Think about working day after day all year with no weekends or vacation--not very realistic or enjoyable. Your quality of life would be positively poor. But on the other hand, a job in which you have absolutely nothing to do can be just as grueling--just as taxing. There must be a middle ground.

Second--and in a much more controversial statement--our narrator says that freed slaves cannot develop internal motivation after having received only external motivation for so long. Frankly, I think this quotation is dangerously close to an "ism" and certainly reflects the time in which it was written. Today, in the United States, most people would raise high eyebrows at you if you said that ex-slaves would not be able to make much of themselves. This would basically alienate about 20% of the U.S. population, though very few U.S. citizens alive today were actually slaves at one point (not in the 1860s-style sense of slavery, anyway--let's not talk about the horrible modern forms of slavery at the moment). There are plentiful examples throughout history of former slaves making far-reaching impacts, and motivating themselves to do great things. I don't think this is a fair statement for the narrator to make at all, and it's definitely controversial at best.

But perhaps this is what C.S. Lewis wanted us to do--think critically about what we are reading. I suspect that C.S. Lewis would not mind someone disagreeing with him, provided they have an argument as to why.