Perelandra: Chapter 14

Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, which will inevitably reveal key plot points. I recommend reading the book first. It's short, I promise.

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The final battle between Ransom and the Un-Man that has possessed the body of Weston began with a brutal fistfight on one of Perelandra's floating mats of vegetation. It continued on the ocean, as the Un-Man escaped on the back of a large fish, with Ransom pursuing. In the midst of the ocean with no floating islands or solid land in sight, Ransom began to have doubts about his mission to stop the Un-Man from corrupting the unfallen Perelandra.

In the dark, Weston approached Ransom again, his own personality apparently having resurfaced. He is terrified: possessed by the malevolent cosmic Force that he served, he had had a glimpse of the afterlife that awaited him, and was utterly terrified. However, when Ransom admonished him to pray to God and set things right, Weston pulled him off his fish and dragged him into the depths of the sea.

Ransom is held underwater until he can no longer hold his breath. He believes he is as good as dead, but he cannot will himself to give up and drown. But then they wash up on a beach. He gets on top of Weston's body, squeezing its ribs with his legs and wrapping his hands around its throat, until he is sure Weston is dead.

The beach is pitch-black and Ransom can do nothing but wait for morning. When light does not come, he realizes that the beach is a subterranean one. He tries to find a way out. He climbs a cliff, having no fear of heights he cannot see, until he finds another ledge, which he follows farther upwards. He finds a little stream and a waterfall, from which he drinks, then follows the stream farther up. When he sees light above him, he climbs through a hole in the roof and emerges into a vast cavern, where the floor slopes down to a cliff over an underground fire that illuminates the cave.

Ransom sees Weston, who survived the strangling, crawling up out of the same hole, followed by some sort of horrific giant insect. Weston (or the Un-Man in his voice) attempts one more appeal to Ransom, but he smashes Weston's head in with a rock in the name of the Trinity, this time putting a definite end to him. With the Un-Man dead, Ransom finds the large insect far less frightening; indeed, it never had any real interest in him in the first place. He heaves Weston's body over the cliff and into the fire. Then, exhausted, he sleeps.

Lewis had had a near-death experience in the trenches in 1918, when he believed he had been mortally wounded by shrapnel from a British shell. He describes the experience in rather detached terms: "I felt no fear and certainly no courage. It did not seem to be an occasion for either. The proposition 'Here is a man dying' stood before my mind as dry, as factual, as unemotional as something in a text-book. It was not even interesting."¹ He gives Ransom the same unemotional awareness of his own imminent demise, putting it in very similar words: "In the immediate presence of death all ideas of the after life were withdrawn from his mind. The mere abstract proposition, 'This is a man dying' floated before him in an unemotional way."

The emergence of the giant Perelandrian bug is also a semi-autobiographical tidbit. It appears to be a segmented creature like a wasp, with multiple eyes like a spider. As a child, Lewis was terrified of insects: "My bad dreams were of two kinds, those about spectres and those about insects. The second were, beyond comparison, the worse; to this day I would rather meet a ghost than a tarantula."² Ransom believes he is about to be undone, not just by Satan's minion, but also Lewis's greatest fear. Once the Un-Man is truly dead, Ransom recognizes the creature for what it really is: just another strange, but harmless, Perelandrian animal. I wonder to what extent Ransom's terror is due to the same evil influence that frightened narrator-Lewis in the first chapter, and possibly sowed doubts in Ransom's mind on the ocean in the previous one, rather than his own natural entomophobia.

Thus ends the Un-Man. Ransom's mission is a success, though his victory was hard won. I find it an interesting coincidence that both Lewis and his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, whose fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings was published about a decade later, depict ultmate evil being destroyed by throwing it into a volcano. Perhaps it wasn't so coincidental. Tolkien had begun The Lord of the Rings in 1939, so it and Perelandra were authored concurrently. No doubt Lewis had heard some of Tolkien's chapters read at meetings of the Inklings. In each case, the volcanic fires of Mount Doom and Perelandra evoke imagery of hell, and hurling ultimate evil into the fire signifies (explicitly, in the One Ring's case) its final destruction.

For that matter, could the philologist Ransom be a fictional Tolkien, just as the novel's narrator in the beginning chapters is a fictional Lewis?

And that is the climax of Perelandra. There are three chapters remaining, all denouement.

Footnotes

1. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Fadedpage.com, updated December 21, 2025, https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20150220.

2. Lewis, Surprised by Joy.