Out of the Silent Planet

The narrator reveals himself to be the author, C. S. Lewis himself. He states that from a literary standpoint, the story is over, but there are still some aspects of the book that need to be clarified.

“Dr. Elwin Ransom” is a protective alias for the real professor about whom the book is written. After his journey back to Earth, “Ransom” gave up on any plans of sharing his story with a wider audience. He convinced himself that his experiences were down to an elaborate hallucination brought on by his sickness, and that would have been the end of the story if not for the narrator. The narrator, a student of Ransom’s, wrote him a letter a few months ago inquiring about the meaning of the word “oyarses,” which he found in a 12th-century Latin text about a journey through space. Ransom immediately invited the narrator to spend the weekend with him and recounted the tale of his adventure on Malacandra, and, since then, the two men have been researching to prepare for the potential end of Earth’s isolation in space. They believe that Weston poses future dangers—“not planetary but cosmic, or at least solar” (152). Ransom came up with the idea to disseminate his story in the form of a fiction book, hoping to familiarize the public with certain ideas, like space as heaven, so that they will be prepared when Weston makes his next move.