C.S. Lewis's 'The Dark Tower' and the Tyrant Within

Authors

  • David Rozema University of Nebraska at Kearney

Abstract

The Dark Tower is an unfinished manuscript that was nearly burned by C.S. Lewis’s brother, Warren, being saved from destruction at the last minute by Walter Hooper. Though incomplete, it has fascinated scholars such as Jared Lobdell and Jonathan Himes because of its science fiction themes and seemingly sexually explicit imagery. But is Lewis’s unfinished novel strictly a disturbing tale of sadism and sexual perversion? David Rozema offers a different reading and a purpose for The Dark Tower that contextualizes it within Lewis’s larger Space Trilogy and Plato’s Republic.

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Author Biography

  • David Rozema, University of Nebraska at Kearney

    David Rozema (Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Utah) is the Inklings Professor of Philosophy and Literature and the director of the philosophy program at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He has co-authored a book on the dialogues of Plato (Platonic Errors: or, Plato, a Kind of Poet, Greenwood Press, 1998) and has published numerous book chapters and essays on the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Soren Kierkegaard, Charles Dickens, Albert Camus, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Wendell Berry.

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Published

2022-06-30

Issue

Volume 38 (2021/2022)

Section

Articles

License

© 2022, Marion E. Wade Center