Lost: “Nothing’s Irreversible”

Doc Jensen at EW often spins away into thin speculation when writing about Lost, but he’s fun to read anyway. Here are his ramblings regarding Lost’s allusions to C.S. Lewis:

I'd like to...bring in our old dead Christian author friend, Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis, whom Lost has cited via our dead red-headed Freighter friend, Charlotte Staples Lewis. C.S. Lewis wrote a great many books that thematically mirror Lost. Besides the Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and The Space Trilogy, there's The Pilgrim's Regress, an allegory about spiritual development involving a man who as a child has a vision of an island that can bring spiritual fulfillment and human purpose. As an adult, he goes on a journey to find the island, only to discover two things: (1) the island is embodied by a person; and (2) The road to the island leads back home. And then there is this:

The Great Divorce

The Great Divorce was Lewis' sorta-kinda response/rebuttal to Dante's Inferno and especially William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. But Lewis' vision of Heaven actually functions as an allegory for how life should be lived in the here and now. Lewis has two big points to make with the book. The first: We can either view the world we live in as an upward slope leading to heaven, or a downward slope leading to hell. The second: As long as we draw breath, there is always time to reverse course. Now here's where the applications to Lost get really interesting:

In his introduction to the book, Lewis (who preferred that his friends call him Jack) tackled the question that's at the center of Lost: How do we ''fix'' ourselves? …His answer:

''I do not think that all those who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists of being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit-by-bit, with 'backwards mutters of dissevering power' — or else not. It is still 'either-or.' If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth), we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.''

…

Application to Lost:

Jack was right in ''LA X'' when he said, ''Nothing's irreversible.'' But healing change does not come from blowing up the past….Stop running away! Stop ''simply going on,'' because it will never ''develop into good,'' and ''time does not heal it.'' And then, once we've dealt with it, we need to bring in the words that Rose gave us in ''LA X'': We need to ''let it go'' and move on. Leave our ''souvenirs of Hell'' behind and move into the fullness of life, and then what lies beyond.

Jensen also speculates that the Lost creators may be playing off an unfinished story of Lewis's called The Dark Tower, published about 14 years after his death (and, not to be confused with the Stephen King series by the same name):

Lewis' The Dark Tower begins with a conversation about time travel. The characters conclude that the past can't be changed. They then find a device called a ''chronoscope'' that allows them to peer into the past or future — or so they think. Looking into the chronoscope, they witness a past or future world (they can't tell which, so they just call it ''Othertime'') in which a devilish character leads people astray, clouding their minds and turning them into virtual zombies. Then a character makes a discovery: The chronoscope isn't a device that allows peeks into other times — it allows them to peek into parallel worlds. He then makes another discovery: His double in Othertime is a bad guy. To prevent him from doing bad things, he crosses over...and accidentally switches minds with his bad doppelganger. And so, while the Good Guy tries to save the day in Othertime, his evil doppelganger wreaks havoc in ''the real world'' and the Good Guy's ''real world'' friends try to stop him.

...

C.S. Lewis technically never finished the story. The Dark Tower only exists as a fragment of a novel, an unfinished work — a Lost story....Part of me is in love with the idea that those Stephen King-loving, Star Wars-grooving writers of Lost are basically taking the raw material of Lewis' Dark Tower and building something new out of it. At the very least, I find myself wondering if Jack made the same mistake in ''Lighthouse'' that the characters in The Dark Tower made about the chronoscope: those mirrors inside the Lighthouse didn't peek into the past — they peeked into the Sideways World.