MANILA TYTANA COLLEGES

Senior High School Department

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for

READING AND WRITING (ENG 112)

A BOOK REVIEW
on

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

Justifying the Interrelationship between the
Concepts of Good and Evil

Submitted by:
Djanine R. Cardinales

Submitted to:

Roi Christian James E. Avila, LPT

Subject Teacher, ENG 112
BOOK TITLE: THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
AUTHOR: C.S. Lewis
PUBLISHING COMPANY: HarperCollins Children’s Books
YEAR PUBLISHED: 2002

THEMATIC ANGLE: Evil cannot only be found in your enemies. It can also be found within you.
That is why to defeat the darkness from the others, you must first defeat the darkness inside
yourself.

BRIEF SUMMARY:
With their parents and Susan in America and Peter away from home, Edmund and Lucy
Pevensie are sent to spend the summer at their troublesome cousin, Eustace's house.
One day, Eustace walks in on Edmund and Lucy discussing a painting of a ship on the
wall of Lucy's bedroom and how it reminds them of their beloved Narnia. Before they know it,
all three children have been swept into the painting, back to the magical realm over which
Edmund and Lucy used to rule and right onto the Dawn Treader, a ship carrying their old
friends, Caspian and Reepicheep.
In spite of Eustace's objections, it is decided that the trio will join the crew of the ship
who are on a quest to find the seven lost lords of Narnia. Along the way, the courageous
adventurers encounter many perils, meet new friends, and make amazing discoveries, but once
their mission is complete they must decide whether to return to Narnia or sail in search of the
World's End where legend says Aslan's home can be found.

AUTHOR’S BACKGROUND:
Clive Staples Lewis was an outstanding Oxford academician and a popular author of
several scholarly books on English literature. He is also a widely read Christian apologist noted
for his great powers of reason and logic. And a man who had seldom been around children and
admitted to being uncomfortable in their company.

CHARACTERS:
(How do the characters’ differences contribute to the thematic angle?)
A. LUCY PEVENSIE
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 B. EDMUND PEVENSIE
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C. PRINCE CASPIAN

D. EUSTACE SCRUBB

SETTING:
(In what way does the setting affect the idea presented in the thematic angle?)
Narnia

CONFLICT:
(How does the conflict relate to the thematic angle?)
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EVIDENCES FROM THE BOOK THAT SUPPORT THE THEMATIC ANGLE

A.____________________________________________________________________________
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B.____________________________________________________________________________
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COMMENTS ON THE AUTHOR’S WORK:

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GENERAL CONCLUSION:
(How does the thematic angle reflect what we have in the real world?)
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BOOK TITLE: HARRY POTTER and the Chamber of Secrets

AUTHOR: J.K. Rowling
PUBLISHING COMPANY: Scholastic Press, a division of Scholastic, INC.
YEAR PUBLISHED: 1999

THEMATIC ANGLE: The concept of Good and of Evil are not necessarily polarities. The
representation of Good can manifest those of Evil and vice versa.

BRIEF SUMMARY:
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is second of the Harry Potter series, following
the Philosopher’s Stone (or Sorcerer’s Stone in the Americanized version).
Herein, the protagonist, Harry is set on a new year in Hogwarts School of Wizardry
together with his friends Ron and Hermoine in surviving the adventures of what young witches
and wizards are supposed to learn throughout the year.
Part of this adventure however lies the mystery of an old tale of the Chamber of Secrets
and the unfortunate events that it brought alongside since it was known that someone had
opened the perilous chamber inside Hogwarts, causing some of the characters’ petrification
through an unknown monster of the chamber.
It was Harry, Hermoine, and Ron’s mission, then, to find out about this mysterious
creature and to unravel the hidden stories behind the gates of the chambers.

AUTHOR’S BACKGROUND:

Although she writes under the pen name J. K. Rowling (pronounced rolling), her name,
before her remarriage, was simply Joanne Rowling. Anticipating that the target audience of
young boys might not want to read a book written by a woman, her publishers asked that she
use two initials rather than her full name. As she had no middle name, she chose K (for
Kathleen) as the second initial of her pen name, from her paternal grandmother. She calls
herself Jo. Following her marriage, she has sometimes used the name Joanne Murray when
conducting personal business. During the Leveson Inquiry she gave evidence under the name of
Joanne Kathleen Rowling and her entry in Who's Who lists her name also as Joanne Kathleen
Rowling.

CHARACTERS:
A. HARRY POTTER

Born with the gift and curse of his lightning-shaped mark, Harry is mostly known as “the
boy who lived” since his survival from the attempts of persecution by the infamous
Voldemort during his infancy.
As the character is included in the house Gryffindor, he embodies the qualities of
bravery and boldness. In his pure desires to help Hogwarts and whosoever is protected
within it, Harry also embodies the qualities of a Hero, a representation of the context of the
‘Good’.

B. VOLDEMORT (TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE)

The main antagonist of the story, Voldemort, in the persona of Tom Riddle was described as
cunning, sly and a trickster. In this manner, he epitomizes the context of ‘Evil’ due to his
corrupted desires for immortality and the troubles that he would face just to achieve it, not to
mention his particular discrimination towards the ‘muggles’ or the non-magical characters
within the story.

SETTING

The Hogwarts School of Wizardry is where most of the story’s plot takes place. The
setting was deemed the refuge of the young students from the outside dangers, particularly for
Harry, who considered the school as his home due to the demise he had experienced from
most of his life living with his Uncle Vernon’s family.
In showcasing the angle that the contexts of Good and Evil are at some point
manifestations of each other, it could be seen that Hogwarts is not only what Dumbledore had
said as the “shelter for every young witch or warlock from the harshness of what lies beyond”.
The aspect of Hogwarts does not necessarily just reflect the concept of the Good, but through
the controversies that were hidden beneath its castle walls, one would notice the premise of
Evil within it.
One way to explain this is through how apparent the edifice hides the Chamber of
Secrets within the deepest parts of its grounds. If established that the Hogwarts castle was a
representation of the Good, then this representation has the infusion of the Evil within it—in
form of the Chamber of Secrets.

CONFLICT:
Harry Potter, the epitome of the Good and his battle with Voldemort (the epitome of
the Evil) has been patterned to the most prominent conflict that is of Man versus Man, of Light
versus Darkness, of Hero versus Antihero.
However, since the premise presented was to prove that both parties involve the
context of the opposing fields, it is necessary to prove that indeed, Potter contains an identity
which rotates around the idea of the Evil.

EVIDENCES FROM THE BOOK THAT SUPPORT THE THEMATIC ANGLE

One evidence that would provide Potter’s amalgamated identities is through the part
when he questioned his becoming part of the house Gryffindor. As he met the Sorting Hat once
again, Potter was told that he was supposed to be in the house Slytherin due to his qualities of
being competitive and stopping at nothing to achieve his purpose. Slytherin, being also
Voldemort’s house when he was still a student seemed to emanate an aura posed by the
concept of Evil due to its characteristics.

Another evidence that would be shown is to how Potter shared Voldemort’s powers
unintentionally when he was cursed with the scar on his forehead. Part of this talent would be
his ability to speak to snakes or Parseltongue, a talent that would only be attuned to those who
are within the realm of the Evil as presented all throughout the story.

COMMENTS ON THE AUTHOR’S WORK:

J.K. Rowling achieved this context that there is no true Good nor a true Evil. What makes
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets successful is that it easily shows how the readers of
the book can easily relate to the story through her philosophical techniques.

GENERAL CONCLUSION:

Such philosophical techniques of Rowling show that in the real world, although almost
everything is labeled only as one-sided: Good or Evil, it is apparent that there is more to the
idea of black and white, that at times morals and beliefs could be a shade of gray. A person is a
combination of all identities, some perhaps of higher level than that of others. But what’s
important is that the inclusion of both context does not define a person’s entirety. As
Dumbledore had put it on the latter part of the story, “…it is not our abilities that show who we
truly are, it is our choices.”