What does it mean to have one’s imagination “converted” or “baptized” by a work of fantasy? In Lewis’s case, it seems that Phantastes rescued his imaginative cast of mind from its dark tendencies—made darker, perhaps, by the onset of the war—and introduced him to a “bright shadow,” a voice or force that drew him out of himself. It set before him a vision of a world that must have seemed wholly unlike his own: pure and radiant, yet morally severe.
