The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Literary Elements

Children's Fiction

Narnia at an unnamed time but the parallel time in the earthly world is the late 1940s to early 1950s

Third person narrator telling the story from his own point of view retellimg a story he has been told, and therefore putting his own spin and feelings onto it

Adventurous, sometimes threatening

The Pevensie children, Caspian and Reepicheep are the protagonists and Eustace is the antagonist for a large part of the novel

The first major conflict is between Eustace and Reepicheep who dislike each other from the start leading to Eustace's constant bullying of Reepicheep.

The fulfillment of the quest that everyone embarked upon, finding the missing seven lords.

The feeling of unease that the Pevensies and Caspian had on encountering the men outside town foreshadows their kidnapping and subsequent sale at the slave market

Caspian says that Eustace is an annoyance which grossly underestimates the trouble he has caused by going off on his own and requiring the others to use time and resources, and to put themselves in possible danger, searching for him.

The narrator alludes to previous novels in the Narnia Chronicles as he mentions the time in which King Peter and Queen Susan rules at Cair Paravel and also alludes to their first entrance into Narnia through the wardrobe by telling the reader that the professor with whom they stayed when they first visited Narnia had sold the country house.

The author uses an enormous amount of color imagery throughout the novel that forces the reader not only to visualize something familiar like the sea, or the sunshine, but also to look at the image they have created more deeply, seeing many different layers of gold in the sunshine or many different degrees of gray and black in the darkness.

Eustace is a paradox in of himself as almost everything he thinks about himself is paradoxical, for example, that he is more patient than others, or that he makes more effort to get along with the Pevensies and Caspian than they do with him.

There is a parallel between the way Eustace did not fit in with others because of his personality and the way in which he is unable to fit in with others physically when he has become a dragon; in both of these identities he is essentially an outsider.

Narnia was excited for the return of the Pevensies, Narnia being used as the term to represent each of the individual Narnians

"The ship seemed to love uneasily as if she felt danger behind her" - the author attributing feelings of unease and the ability to discern danger to the ship