This is why I am way less fond of PC than all the other Narnia books, because there's a lack of focus on who the main character, or characters, are. In LWW, it was all the Pevensies as a unit. Lucy seems like she gets the most attention, but that's because she's the one most often used as a POV character. In terms of what the characters do and what is done to them, and how they mature, Lucy doesn't do much beyond befriend Mr. Tumnus and rallying her siblings to help him. She doesn't suffer the way Peter, Edmund, and Susan do (Susan suffers when Maugrim the wolf trees her and nearly bites her foot, and I always had the impression she suffered twice as much as Lucy did when Aslan died, because not only did she have the grief of Aslan but Lucy's as well.)

In PC the Pevensies are there again acting as a unit, but there's also Caspian and his unit of Talking Beasts, human allies, and dwarves, who outnumber the Pevensies. Let's face it, in the book Caspian does doodly-squat when it comes to fighting back against Miraz. He doesn't even get to raise a weapon against him. Peter does that, but oh noes, Miraz is done in by Glozelle and Sopespian, so this evil trio can be considered as a third unit of characters. Then, Aslan and his river gods, dryads, and naiads are a fourth. The book is a bit of a mess.

I could see any new movies trying to make one or more characters into the "main" one(s) of the story, that's just good storytelling. Lucy and Edmund navigate towards the roles in LWW more than Peter and Susan. But to make Peter and Susan the main characters of a new Prince Caspian movie doesn't make sense because there's just so little of them there in the PC book to begin with.

IMO a new Prince Caspian movie would focus on the Pevensies as a unit and make the Caspian unit of characters all secondary. This way, the movie would focus on the grief of their discovery that Narnia is in ruins, maybe have some flashbacks back to their days of being kings and queens. When they save Trumpkin, he can give them some rudimentary backstory about the situation. NO cutaways to Caspian and Miraz. That way, the viewers can discover what's happened along with the Pevensies, and not have it presented to them separately via Caspian's POVs. It would be a lot more effective, mysterious, and threatening.

For me, Prince Caspian (the book) can only be considered as Prince Caspian's story.

As I mentioned in the other topic, the thing that sets the plot in motion is the birth of Caspian's cousin, and the thing that resolves the plot at the end is restoring Prince Caspian to the throne. The Pevensies by contrast don't even have any agency over their decision to enter Narnia in the first place - that results from Caspian's action of blowing the horn 

That is not to say that the Pevensies have nothing significant to contribute to the proceedings, or that they don't have any interesting moments of character growth and development within the story,... It's just that I think I would just struggle to say that the story as a whole is in anyway about them.

Perhaps my opinion might be different if the text explored all of Caspian's backstory from the POV of one of the Pevensies actually being there alongside him, but as it is with the Flashback structure, I have to say it's fundamentally Caspian's story alone.

I sometimes feel like I'm the only Narnia fan — at least on this website — who actually loves Prince Caspian as it is, every bit as much as all the other Chronicles. I think that's at least partly because despite the pacing problems with the plot, the overall theme of it — the restoration of a world of wonder that seemed to have been lost forever — is deeply meaningful to me personally, but that's beside the point here.

The book itself does start out with all the focus on the Pevensies and "the grief of their discovery that Narnia is in ruins", which to me is the best way Lewis could have started it, as the majority of first-time readers of PC will already have read LWW (and now possibly MN and HHB too, which of course weren't yet written at the time PC was published). They'll already know the Pevensies as characters and feel the shock along with them as they realise this ruined castle is Cair Paravel itself — that they're back in the kingdom they once ruled over, but something has gone horribly wrong. A lot of the rest of the story is devoted to answering that question "What happened to Narnia?!"

The switch to Caspian's point of view for several chapters partway through the book is a bit awkward even for a novel and probably wouldn't work well in a film, which is why we keep having these debates about how future adaptations should handle this particular story. But even though it's true that Caspian plays less of a role in the book than we might expect from its title, I would say that having part of the story told from his POV is hugely important. If Lewis hadn't given us Caspian's full backstory as part of the narrative, Caspian would be a sort of vague enigma — this young guy whom we have to accept as the rightful heir to the throne and a worthy successor to the Pevensies, as the first ruler of Narnia since their time who loves the Talking Beasts and other sentient native Narnian peoples and who governs Narnia as it was meant to be governed. If Caspian wasn't portrayed in detail, we would just have to accept on faith that he really is the right bloke for the job, even though we hardly know anything about him, except that he's of the same stock as the Telmarines who have spent the past 1,300 years or so totally messing up Narnia.

For the story Lewis is telling, and the deeper message he's getting across, it's vital that we get to know Caspian pretty well — that someone who's grown up with a background of being told "those stories of the Old Days are just myths, they were never true, get over them" can still carry on hoping that the lost magic of Narnia is real and wanting to find it, and confirm at last that it IS true and it's his duty to restore Narnia to what it should be. (Again, to someone who grew up hoping that the stories of Jesus and Christianity were true, despite being surrounded by adults who didn't care for any of that "religious" stuff and were very much against anyone taking it seriously... this story is viscerally relatable.) And it's also important that Caspian is well developed as a character by the time we get to the next book in the series, VDT, in which he also plays a central role. He isn't the POV character for most of that story (except in the episode on the Lone Islands), but it's helpful if we as readers already know who he is and why Edmund and Lucy are so delighted to find themselves on his ship!

It's true that while Caspian does a lot of work in rallying the Old Narnians to stand against Miraz's forces, he himself doesn't play the crucial role in overthrowing the evil king — and yes, surprisingly, neither do Peter or Edmund, despite the Pevensies having been specially and magically called in at this pivotal moment in Narnia's history. I remember feeling as a 7-year-old reader that it was a slight let-down that Miraz wasn't defeated by Caspian or either of the Pevensie brothers, but stabbed in the back (literally and figuratively) by one of his two aides who were only recently introduced as plotting to take the throne from him! But that's how Lewis chose to have Miraz die, and he must have had his own reasons for bringing down the key villain in that way. Perhaps he felt it was better not to have Caspian, Peter or Edmund kill Miraz directly — to have his blood on any of the heroes' hands — but rather to have Miraz, the usurper who murdered his own brother for the throne, murdered in turn by another scheming deceiver? It does make a pretty good moral point, that Miraz is not granted an honourable death in a fair fight, but is killed by the same kind of treachery that he always lived by.

Getting back to the Pevensies' roles in this story, I totally agree that it's significant that we never find out what Susan's reaction was to being told that she would never come back to Narnia. We only hear about it from Peter, who, when Lucy asks "Can you bear it?", simply responds "Well, I think I can... It's all rather different from what I thought. You'll understand when it comes to your last time." We aren't told at this point that Aslan is in our world too, under a different name — that comes for us as readers when he speaks to Lucy and Edmund at the end of the next book — but we can assume he said much the same thing to the two older siblings. I would guess, from Peter's attitude here, that he's already started to twig who Aslan is and where to find him in our world, and that's why never returning to Narnia isn't such a crushing prospect as he would have thought before. But we don't hear Susan's thoughts on it at all. Did she not understand what Aslan meant about them meeting him in this world too — or maybe she did understand and pushed the idea away, perhaps already being sceptical about religion? We don't know.

I think, though, the clearest indication we get of Susan's future rejection of Narnia is actually earlier in PC, when the Pevensies and Trumpkin are following Aslan, but none of them except Lucy can see him at first. When they do see him, it's in the order of their willingness to believe that he's there; Susan is the last except for Trumpkin, who didn't believe in Aslan at all until this point. But most tellingly, when he speaks to Susan, Aslan doesn't show any anger towards her, but simply says "You have listened to fears, child... Come, let me breathe on you. Forget them. Are you brave again?" And all Susan says in response is: "A little, Aslan." It's as if she isn't letting the Lion's presence have the effect on her that it should have — as if she's resisting him somehow, instead of being overjoyed at rediscovering him and finding him forgiving her doubts and taking away her fears. Given that, it's not so surprising that Susan, of all the Pevensies, goes on to be "no longer a friend of Narnia".

So "whose story is Prince Caspian's"? The book isn't totally about him, but then, none of the seven Chronicles focuses on the development of just one character. Perhaps Lewis could have chosen a different title for this one — but then, what else might he have called it? (He did in fact subtitle it The Return to Narnia, but that's only ever been printed on the title page, not the cover. I've read elsewhere that he originally considered Drawn into Narnia or A Horn in Narnia as titles, but his publisher didn't agree with those.) It's a story that has a lot going on in it, and it is rather oddly paced, but it's still worthwhile digging into it and wondering why Lewis might have chosen to write it as he did — he was a very experienced author by the time he wrote this book, not a first- or second-time novelist, after all. I can't get enough of it myself, at any rate!  

As I mentioned in the other topic, the thing that sets the plot in motion is the birth of Caspian's cousin, and the thing that resolves the plot at the end is restoring Prince Caspian to the throne. The Pevensies by contrast don't even have any agency over their decision to enter Narnia in the first place - that results from Caspian's action of blowing the horn 

That is not to say that the Pevensies have nothing significant to contribute to the proceedings, or that they don't have any interesting moments of character growth and development within the story,... I think I would just struggle to say that the story as a whole is in anyway about them.

Perhaps my opinion might be different if the text explored all of Caspian's backstory from the POV of one of the Pevensies actually being there alongside him, but as it is with the Flashback structure, I have to say it's fundamentally Caspian's story alone.

Lewis handled the Pevensies much better in The Horse and His Boy, which was about Shasta/Cor, with Susan, Edmund and Lucy serving that plot and playing a vital role in it. But then, they didn't have anything to "learn" from Aslan in it. In PC they are taught a few lessons from him, whereas Caspian isn't taught any. So the argument is there that they are the main group in that they receive Aslan's guidance and mature in a spiritual sense.

In a movie, this might work as Caspian telling them his story when they return with Trumpkin, showing it in a series of short flashes instead of a long, drawn-out flashback, and having the Ps draw parallels from it to their own story of what happened to them when they returned from Narnia the first time, tying it together.

As for Susan, I think Lewis just figured having one P hinting at what Aslan said was enough for the reader so I wouldn't say it influenced Susan's later denial. That she says "just a little" is more telling, IMO.

Posted by: @courtenay

I sometimes feel like I'm the only Narnia fan — at least on this website — who actually loves Prince Caspian as it is, every bit as much as all the other Chronicles. I think that's at least partly because despite the pacing problems with the plot, the overall theme of it — the restoration of a world of wonder that seemed to have been lost forever — is deeply meaningful to me personally, but that's beside the point here.

Believe me you're not!  I love Prince Caspian - it was the first Narnia book I read and I have no problems whatsoever with the pacing or the plot. The fact that PC has a story within a story to introduce Caspian and explain what happened since the Pevensies left Narnia is no more problematic to me than Voyage of the Dawntreader being episodic and not having a main villain. Each of the Chronicles is different and each has a unique charm of its own

...I'm going to be perhaps slightly contrary here, and say I am not convinced that it's *whose* story this is, so much as *what's.* I think that at its core Prince Caspian is *Narnia'* story - it's about the return of the legendary ruler-children in Narnia's time of crisis, what that crisis is, and the hand-off of the land's care to a new figure who is ready to listen to its spirit and its needs, who will found the next dynasty. It's also the contrast between what the Pevensies knew of Narnia, and what Narnia has become.