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No Mere Materialism: The Revelatory Nature Of Death In C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, Laurel Wood

Global Tides

This paper explores the role which death plays in the narrative of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. During the time of the trilogy’s composition, materialist philosophy was becoming increasingly popular in the Western world as individuals looked to science as the source of absolute truth. As a former materialist, Lewis was alarmed by this development and confronted materialist ideology in numerous fiction and non-fiction works.

Blending textual evidence from the trilogy with scholarly commentary, this paper demonstrates that Lewis uses death, particularly the fear of annihilation and the afterlife which it evokes, to bypass materialist assertions of the atheistic nature of …