Narnia is not escapist

You don’t escape to Narnia

https://www.google.com/amp/s/mereorthodoxy.com/you-dont-escape-to-narnia

An interesting juxtaposition of CS Lewis’s Narnia vs more modern media, like Harry Potter or Les Grossman’s The Magicians.

Throughout the whole saga, one point is made piercingly clear. There is no sense in which one loses themselves in Narnia. One does not go to Narnia in order to explore, out of a sense of sheer curiositas. Instead, one is meant to find something there, something beyond and beneath the surface level of experience, and the physical limits of Narnia all exist in service of that pedagogical end.

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Narnia, that is to say, is not an escape. By its nature, it cannot be. Rather, adventures in Narnia are conditioning experiences by which individuals come to see reality properly. As The Last Battle concludes in eschatological splendor, the faun Mr. Tumnus remarks to Lucy that “you are now looking at the England within England, the real England just as this is the real Narnia. And in that inner England no good thing is destroyed.”^[18] Exactly so.

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Indeed, I get the feeling, that too much modern fictional media has a seemingly unlimited world, with stunted limited viewpoints, while Narnia is a deliberately limited small world, where the people come out with more expansive views. That in fact, was the reason the children came to Narnia in the first place.

Fantasy at its best (Lewis, Tolkien, etc) is not an escape. It is a preparation for the real world.