The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was published by Geoffrey Bles in 1952 and was the third of the seven Chronicles of Narnia novels to appear, though modern editions place it fifth in the reading order because it follows the earlier history of Narnia rather than the publication sequence. C. S. Lewis wrote it while the series was still being published annually, and the American edition of the same year carried revisions that stayed in American printings until the 1990s.

The book is structured as a voyage rather than a plot. Each island the Dawn Treader reaches is a self-contained episode with a moral attached, and Lewis uses them to work through ideas he had already touched on in the earlier volumes: the desire for wealth, the temptation to know what should not be known, the difference between courage and vanity. Reepicheep the mouse, who is sailing east because he intends to reach the country at the end of the world, is the series' most single-minded character and the engine of the last chapters.

Eustace Scrubb arrives as the cousin every reader is invited to dislike and is turned into a dragon about a third of the way through, which is the book's most famous sequence and the closest Narnia comes to a fairy-tale transformation. The novel was adapted for television in 1989 and as a feature film in 2010, and it is the Narnia book that most clearly reads as a set of stories for children told by an adult who is enjoying himself.