"Till We Have Faces" Discussion Questions

1. What do you think are some possible morals of the story?

2. How did you feel/what did you think when you got to the end of Part 1?

3. What does it mean to have a "face"?

4. When did Orual find her "face", and why didn't she have one before?

5. How did Psyche and Orual differ in their attitudes and beliefs towards God?

6. How in the end did Orual "become Psyche"?

7. My first time reading this I thought Psyche's character was going to be a Christ-figure, but it turns out that the comparison doesn't hold the whole way through. However, she is, like Lewis mentions below, Christ-like. How do you explain her thoughts since her youth about the wonderful god in his mansion on the mountain? And what can we learn from Psyche?

8. What did Orual learn about love and about herself? (I think she had several learning experiences even before her visions in later life)

The following is C. S. Lewis's account of the meaning of Till We Have Faces (taken from letter to Clyde Kilby, February 10, 1957; in LL, 273-74).
"An author doesn't necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else, so I give my account of Till we have Faces simply for what it is worth. The 'levels' I am conscious of are these:
A work of (supposed) historical imagination. A guess of what it might have been like in a little barbarous state on the borders of the Hellenistic world of Greek culture, just beginning to affect it. Hence the change from the old priest (of a very normal fertility mother-goddess) to Arnom; Stoic allegorizations of the myths standing to the original cult rather as Modernism to Christianity (but this is a parallel, not an allegory). Much that you take as allegory was intended solely as realisitic detail. The wagon men are nomads from the steppes. The children made mud pies not for symbolic purposes but because children do. The Pillar Room is simply a room. The Fox is such an educated Greek slave as you might find at a barbarous courst--and so on.
Psyche is an instance of the anima naturaliter Christiana making the best of the Pagan religion she is brought up in and thus being guided (but always 'under the cloud', always in terms of her own imaginations or that of her people) towards the true God. She is in some ways like Christ because every good man or woman is like Christ. What else could they be like? But of course my interest is primarily Orual.
Orual is (not a symbol) but an instance, a 'case' of human affection in its natural condition, true, tender, suffering, but in the long run tyrannically possessive and ready to turn to hatred when the beloved ceases to be its possession. What such love particularly cannot stand is to see the beloved passing into a sphere where it cannot follow. All this I hoped would stand as a mere story in its own right. But-- Of course I had always in mind its close parallel to what is probably happening at this moment in at least five families in your home town. Someone becomes a Christian, or in a family nominally Christian already, does something like becoming a missionary or entering a religious order. The others suffer a sense of outrage. What they love is being taken from them. The boy must be mad. And the conceit of him! Or: is there something in it after all? Let's hope it is only a phase! If only he had listened to his natural advisers. Oh come back, come back, be sensible, be the dear son we used to know! Now I, as a Christian, have a good deal of sympathy with those jealous, suffering, puzzled people (for they do suffer, and out of their suffering much of the bitterness against religion arises). I believe the thing is common. There is very nearly a touch of it in Luke II. 38, 'Son, why hast thou so dealt with us?' And is the reply easy for a loving heart to bear?"