The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe

Unlike most of my peers in grade school, I never read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. So, naturally when I had the opportunity to choose a book that I would journal on, I chose this popular fantasy to make up for my loss as a child. The story has its advantages and disadvantages.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is classified as a heroic or quest fantasy which calls for a story beginning with characters in a primary world who find some passage into a secondary world. When four brothers and sisters named Peter, Edmund, Susan, and Lucy are whisked away from World War II in London and are sent to an old professor's home, they never expect to discover a magical and enchanted wardrobe closet. Depite their sister's confidence in the land of Narnia, Lucy's older siblings do not believe the young child and her journey through the wardrobe into the land of white witches and magical fauns. It is not until all four children decide to hide in the wardrobe closet when visitors are touring the mysterious mansion, that Lucy's saga of the land of Narnia suddenly is transformed into reality before their very eyes. A new challenge faces the four siblings. They now have the obligation of saving Narnia from the wicked white witch and her wishes of ruling the land forever.
As children read this story, they are empowered and motivated when an average set of children with no specific powers or skills of magic are placed in Narnia to defeat the witch. Even though children love nothing more than being placed at the center of these heroic fantasies with an impossible task, they adore defeating the villian of the fantasy with no magic involved. It is much easier for a child to associate themselves with average children withholding no magical powers like the four protagonists in this story. They place themselves in the shoes of young Edmund, Peter, Susan, and Lucy and discover that attributes such as goodness always prevails over evil. C.S Lewis does a magnificent job of incorporating this particular theme in his fantasy.
Even though the tale motivates children, parts of the story line are a bit dark. There are two sections in the story that I found most disturbing. The first occurs when the wicked white witch has captured young Edmund and travels to search for the three other children after the child indicates where his brother and sisters are hidden. Edmund is depicted with his hand tied tightly behind his back being dragged by the dwarf, the queen's assistant. The queen is found calling Edmund a fool and even a brute in this section of the tale. The next section that was extremely gruesome occurs towards the end of the tale when Lucy and Susan find that their hero, Aslan the Lion, is tormented by the witch. The witch jeers at the Lion while her evil assistants which include hags, dwarfs and apes charge at the animal. They proceed to shave his beautiful golden mane, bind his paws together, and muzzle him. Aslan is eventaully killed at the end of this miserable torturing.