Eustace Scrubb

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Narnia character
Eustace Scrubb
Race/Nation	Human / England
Gender	Male
Birthplace	England, Earth
Family
Parents	Harold & Alberta Scrubb
Other	Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie (cousins)
Major character in
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
The Last Battle
Portrayals in Adaptations
1989 BBC miniseries: David Thwaites

Eustace Clarence Scrubb is a character in C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. He appears in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and The Last Battle. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, he is accompanied by Edmund and Lucy Pevensie, his cousins. In The Silver Chair and The Last Battle, he is accompanied by Jill Pole, a classmate from his school.

[edit] Synopsis

We meet Eustace at the beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with the memorable opening line, "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." He is the only child of what Lewis describes as progressive parents, who send him to a progressive mixed school. Eustace calls his parents by their first names; his parents are vegetarians, nonsmokers, teetotallers, and wear a special kind of underclothes. At his school, the bullies are supported by the administration, and all the pupils address each other by surname only.

It can be gathered from Eustace's behavior, and the tone that Lewis used in describing his family and school, that Lewis thought such behavior silly and disliked it a great deal. In fact, at the beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lucy and Edmund (heroes from earlier books) find Eustace unbearable and hate having to visit him and his parents.

The narrative of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader focuses a great deal on Eustace, as he is drawn into Narnia and aboard the eponymous ship along with Lucy and Edmund. Part of the story is told from extracts of his diary, mostly to show how skewed his point of view is. He describes the ship being in a perpetual storm, a perception partially colored by his tendency towards seasickness (though he is cured of this by Narnian magic); in fact, it is mostly smooth sailing from the perspective of a classical sailing ship, as Lucy, Edmund and the other passengers and crew are aware. Eustace perceives his cousins and the others on board ship as being in foolish denial of the supposed rough seas rather than facing the "truth" of the situation as he sees it. He also complains a great deal about how Lucy has been given Caspian's cabin, and spends time trying to convince members of the crew that by giving girls special treatment they are actually 'putting them down, and making them weaker.' Moreover, he doesn't even realize that he is in another universe and, in fact, has considerable trouble even comprehending that fact, let alone adjusting to it: he is continually searching for a British embassy to help the travelers out of their bind, or for a British-styled court system where he can, for example, "lodge an action" against Caspian for allowing Reepicheep to nearly kill him after Eustace grabs him by the tail and whirls him around, just for fun, of course.

The change in Eustace starts after he is turned into a dragon by sleeping on the hoard of a recently deceased dragon, with "greedy, dragonish thoughts" in his head (cf. Fafnir). When he returns to the crew, he is nearly attacked, but Lucy realizes that the dragon is Eustace. The experience of having been a dragon changes him; instead of being his usual sulky self, he uses his new abilities to be helpful. The problem comes when it is time to leave the island, as the ship will not hold a dragon, or enough food to feed a dragon. During this period, Reepicheep, the talking mouse, is very kind to him, even though Eustace has been quite cruel to Reepicheep previously. Eustace is very grateful for this and becomes friends with Reepicheep for the rest of the voyage.

Eventually, Eustace has an encounter with Aslan during which he becomes human again. He returns to camp and tells the story to Edmund first; Edmund shares with Eustace his own redemption story, remarking that "you were only an ass, but I was a traitor." After this, Eustace improves, though he still retains some of his bad habits. When Eustace returns to our world at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, his parents notice the changes in him. His mother thinks he has become tiresome and commonplace, and blames it on the influence of his cousins, "those Pevensie children". Eustace returns to his school, and at the beginning of The Silver Chair, we are informed that he no longer fits in there the way he used to. As a result, he befriends fellow misfit Jill Pole, and their joint desire to be away from the school is what draws them into Narnia. In any event, Eustace displays considerable courage and responsibility in Silver Chair and upon his return to Narnia in The Last Battle where he fought an ultimately losing battle to save the country of Narnia from corruption.

As one of the "friends of Narnia" from Earth, who still believed in Narnia and followed the principles of that world and of Aslan, Eustace was spared from the end of Narnia and brought into Aslan's country to live out the rest of eternity in happiness.

[edit] Commentary

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The narrator has a great deal of sympathy for Eustace, which is not surprising since Eustace very strongly resembles Lewis himself: an intellectual and skeptic who formerly enjoyed raking believers over his satirical coals, but acquires a Christian faith through a great personal crisis. Eustace's experience in this regard makes him the ideal person to reach out to others of his kind, as exemplified by his bringing Jill into the circle of "friends of Narnia".

Lewis may have been referencing his own name (Clive Staples Lewis) with the opening line of the book. Lewis disliked his name, preferring instead to be called Jack.

In the context of the Christian themes of the Chronicles of Narnia, Eustace's story of repentance and change is a surprisingly literal illustration of 2 Corinthians 5:17 ("if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are died; behold, all things are become new"). It is also, of course, an "alternate take" on Edmund's experience. This also brings to mind Christ's admonition to the formerly lame man that he had healed: "Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee." John 5:14.