Chapter 8: The Closet in the Sitting Room

Chapter 8: The Closet in the Sitting Room

(H. S. Wift, June 1st, 2011)

In closets, you find Narnia. It’s true. Every closet is a gateway to Narnia10, and so when people clamber into the first closet they find in this most ludicrous of houses, they expect to find that wonderful winter wonderland. But they don’t. They find a wooden wall.

It is the ultimate test. The test of their curiosity. They could find Narnia in that closet if they really wanted to, they just don’t try hard enough. They meet a wooden barrier. It’s amazing what a sheet of mahogany can do.

After all, every gateway must have a gate.

10

The first book in C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), features the Pevensie children travelling from their home universe to the parallel, magical world known as Narnia through a portal at the back of their guardian’s wardrobe, first arriving in a whimsical snowy landscape. The wardrobe’s power is largely unexplained in this book, but in Lewis’s prequel, The Magician’s Nephew (1955), it is revealed that it derives its properties from having been carved from the wood of a unique, magical apple-tree.

Ergo, either the Narnia to which all closets in Our Strange and Wonderful House’s universe connect is a different, parallel Narnia to Lewis’s canonical iteration, or the unseen narrator is lying to us. 22