The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Eustace Scrubb is one of the protagonists in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and he is arguably the most flawed and in the most dire need of spiritual awakening. He also reappears in the series as a main character in The Silver Chair and The Last Battle. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace initially plays the part of an antihero, as evidenced by the novel’s humorous opening sentence: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it” (1). At the beginning of the story, Eustace’s behavior is habitually mean, selfish, and arrogant, and the narrator implies that the boy’s fondness for cut-and-dried information also indicates his lack of imagination and is portrayed as a significant character flaw: “Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools” (1).

Eustace is also unrelievedly self-centered, a trait that is exemplified by his spiteful journal entries during the sea voyage east of Narnia. In these passages, Lewis deliberately distances himself from his character’s petulance and immaturity by forcing Eustace to act as an unreliable first-person narrator.