Eustace Scrubb

Eustace Clarence Scrubb is a character in C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. He appears in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and The Last Battle. In 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.

We meet Eustace at the beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. He is the only child of what Lewis refers to as 'progressive' parents, who send him to a 'progressive' mixed school. Eustace calls his parents by their first names, his parents were vegetarians, nonsmokers, teetotallers, wore a special kind of underclothes, and made Eustace take a 'tonic' daily. At his school the bullies were 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 the author uses in describing his family and school, that the author thought such behavior silly and disliked it a great deal. In fact at the beginning of Dawn Treader Lucy and Edmund (heroes from earlier books) found Eustace unbearable and hated having to visit him and his parents.

The narrative of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader focuses a great deal on Eustace. Part of the story is told from the point of view of his diary, mostly to show how skewed his point of view was. He describes the ship being in a perpetual storm, and complained a great deal about how Lucy was given Caspian's cabin, and spent time trying to convince members of the crew that by giving girls special treatment they are actually 'putting them down, and making them weaker.' The change in Eustace starts after he was turned to a dragon by sleeping on the horde of a recently deceased dragon. Sleeping on a dragon's horde with greedy thoughts will often change your average annoying schoolboy into a dragon. The point that made his being a dragon unbearable was that he had put a bracelet on his upper arm while he was still a boy. The bracelet did not disappear with his clothes, but remained on his arm, and dug painfully into the flesh. It was because of this bracelet that the crew of the ship came to the conclusion that he had once been a human. The crew was ready to kill him having assumed that he had eaten Eustace when someone noticed that he was hurt. Lucy eventually figured out that the dragon was Eustace rather than one of the missing Narnian Lords the boat had set out to find. He was able to help the crew a great deal by hunting wild goats and uprooting a tree to fix the mast. The problem came when it was time to leave, as the ship would not hold a dragon, or enough food to feed a dragon. At that point Eustace had an experience with Aslan which he was never sure if it was a dream or not. Eustace saw a lion (whom he did not recognize or know anything about) at night and followed it. The lion led him to a pool, which Eustace very much wanted to bathe in to soothe his leg/arm. The lion stopped him, telling him that he had to undress first. Eustace shed his skin and went to get in the pool but the lion stopped him again, because his skin had gone right back to being hard and scaly. After a few more times of Eustace shedding his skin, the lion said that he would have to undress Eustace. Eustace described the undressing as very painful because the lion used his claws and seem to cut through him 'right to his center.' The lion then threw Eustace into the pond which smarted at first then felt 'lovely.' He described the skin that the lion took off as thick and dark and ugly. After getting out of the pool Eustace found he was a boy again. The lion provided him with clothes, warned him not to go back to his old ways and left him.

Eustace returned to camp and told the story to Edmund first; Edmund shared with Eustace his own redemption story, remarking that "you were only an ass, but I was a traitor". After that Eustace improved, but he still was mean sometimes, just by force of habit. In the context of the Christian allegory 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 passed away; behold, all things are become new.") It is also, of course, an "alternate take" on Edmund's experience.

It should also be noted that before he was a dragon Eustace was horribly cruel to Reepicheep the talking mouse. However, while he was a dragon Reepicheep was very kind to him and practically the only member of the crew that could still talk to him like he was 'normal.' Reepicheep was able to tell Eustace quite a bit about Narnia because there was very little work that Reepicheep could help with, so he spent all his spare time with Eustace. Eustace was very grateful for this and became fast friends with Reepicheep for the rest of the voyage.

When Eustace returned to our world at the end of Dawn Treader, his parents noticed the changes in him. It is also apparent that his mother thought it for the worse, and blamed it on "those tiresome 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 talking to Jill she comments on how different he had become and he admits that he was "an absolute beast last term." Perhaps, in this vein, his name is a play on words, "Eustace Scrubb" being similar to "used to scrub." In any event, Eustace displays considerable courage and responsibility in Silver Chair and upon his return to Narnia in The Last Battle.

The narrator has a great deal of sympathy for Eustace, which is not surprising since Eustace very strongly resembles Lewis himself: a intellectual and skeptic who formerly enjoyed raking believers over his satirical coals, but is brought to a saving knowledge of Christ through a great personal crisis. Scrubb'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".

The Chronicles of Narnia C. S. Lewis
Peter | Susan | Edmund | Lucy | Eustace | Jill | Digory Kirke | Caspian Aslan | Reepicheep | Tash | Tisroc | Mr. Tumnus | White Witch | Puddleglum
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