39 pages • 1 hour read
C. S. LewisSurprised by Joy
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1955A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Miniature Garden
Lewis’s first experience of Joy comes through the miniature garden his brother makes in the lid of a biscuit tin—or, rather, through the memory of that garden, which elicits “a sensation, of course, of desire, but of desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss […]” (16). This garden is loaded with meaning. The miniature garden, Lewis writes, had first given him an idea of nature—a clearer idea than his real garden could. The garden contains his idea of Paradise, and all these things are true of it: Tt is an artistic representation of a perfect place, rather than a real place; it is miniature and therefore inaccessible (you can’t walk around in it); it has to be inhabited by the imagination.
All of these qualities reflect not just Lewis’s imagining of Paradise, but his eventual understanding of the nature of reality itself. To Lewis, there is something very big, realer than anything around us, and infinitely desirable, just out of sight, glimpsable only through an imaginative reach.
Chess
Lewis uses the metaphor of chess twice in his chapter headings: “Check,” for the chapter in which he encounters George MacDonald’s Phantastes, and “Checkmate,” for the chapter in which he admits to himself that he believes. This metaphor—of a logical game of skill, played against a clever opponent—gives us a sense of both Lewis’s character and his way of imagining God. Faith, for Lewis, is not a thing of swelling emotion or “just knowing.” While his emotional experience of Joy is fundamental to his conversion, it doesn’t work alone; rather, it works alongside a process of intense reasoning. The intellectual process of conversion is here represented as a game that Lewis doesn’t even know he’s playing until he’s been soundly defeated.
Chess itself is a metaphorical and symbolic game, representing the people of a kingdom and the movements of a battlefield. The idea of the board game as a microcosm of the world also suggests Lewis’s individual experience as a cosmic struggle in miniature: The internal world can contain epics.
Insects
Lewis mentions his intense childhood fear of insects at the beginning of his story. The trouble with bugs, he says, is that “their angular limbs, their jerky movements, their dry, metallic noises, all suggest either machines that have come to life or life degenerating into mechanism” (8). While Lewis doesn’t specifically return to this phobia again, it’s telling that he gives it such prominence in the first chapter. Through the image of insects as machines, he’s exploring a theme that underlies his conversion narrative: the beauty and necessity of human free will. The mechanical quality of insects seems sinister to him because it suggests a life without thought or individual volition—without, in short, those qualities that make humans special. Lewis’s intense desire for truth and understanding stand in opposition to all that is unthinking, animalistic, and automatic.
Lewis also links his fear of insects to his fear of corpses when he describes injured soldiers as “moving like half-crushed beetles” (196). In both the insect and the dead body, Lewis sees the horror of existence without a soul.
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By C. S. Lewis
