Confessions of The Neverending Story
How a piece of children's literature unexpectedly reminded me of a spiritual classic
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I have unexpectedly surpassed 100 subscribers. I cannot express how encouraging it is for such wonderful writers to be willing to read, let alone share, my work. I hope those of you who found me through their publications are ready to dive into the first commonplace quote coming from my Commonplace Journal 2.0!If you’ve ever taken a literature class, at some point you have probably wondered if someone can, in fact, read too much into a text. Does the color of that character’s dress actually matter? Isn’t it just a coincidence that those two stories have similar plots? Is the author really using subtext to convey a message that is the opposite of the text’s plain meaning?
We ask these questions. We joke about the teachers and critics who offer (seemingly) odd answers to these questions. Yet, if you love literature, you also know the thrill that comes when you stumble upon hidden meanings in, unexpected connections between, or unusual analyses of the books that mean so much to us. The danger of misreading a text is, of course, always present. We are human after all. Despite this danger, delving deeply into literature is a worthwhile pursuit. After all, even textual misreadings can provide entertainment and insight when they inspire a spirited response. I make these prefatory remarks because, in today’s post, I’m offering a textual reading that is definitely odd and possibly a sort of “misreading.” But I can’t get the idea out of my head, and I think Substack is the perfect place to have it critiqued.
I was sitting on a stump by our sandbox, catching up on commonplacing while my children supervised their construction site. I’d recently finished The Neverending Story, a text I hadn’t revisited since middle school. It was just as strange and disorienting of a story as I remembered. And copying down a passage from this strange story led to a strange thought: This reminds me of Augustine’s Confessions.
The passage in question marks a key transition in the The Neverending Story. The first part of the book narrates the experiences of Bastian Balthazar Bux as he reads a book called “The Neverending Story.” In it, Bastian discovers the land of Fantastica, populated by a myriad of mythological and magical creatures. Unfortunately, the ruler of Fantastica, the Childlike Empress, is mysteriously ill. As a result, Fantastica is being eaten up by patches of Nothingness. The Childlike Empress chooses Atreyu, a boy similar in age to Bastian, to search for the cause and cure of her illness. Atreyu receives the Empress’ jewel, the amulet AURYN1, which protects him from harm and grants him the authority to call upon the aid of all Fantasticans. Atreyu’s greatest helper is Falkor the luckdragon. As Bastian becomes emotionally invested in Atreyu’s mission, he discovers that he is more than a mere reader of “The Neverending Story.” He is, in fact, the only one who can cure the Childlike Empress and save Fantastica. He eventually does so, traveling to Fantastica to meet the Childlike Empress. She “rewards” him with AURYN, which has an inscription on the back: Do what you wish.
The power of AURYN, combined with his storytelling abilities, means that Bastian can make anything he wishes become a reality in Fantastica. And it is Bastian’s journey from wish to wish that forms the plot of The Neverending Story’s second section. Shortly after receiving AURYN, he meets with Grograman, a magical lion, and discusses what the inscription on the amulet truly means.
“Do what you wish. That must mean I can do anything I feel like. Don’t you think so?” [asked Bastian].
All at once Grograman’s face looked alarmingly grave, and his eyes glowed. “No…it means that you must do what you really and truly want. And no thing is more difficult.”
“What I really and truly want? What do you mean by that?”
“It’s your own deepest secret and you yourself don’t know it.”
“How can I find out?”
“By going the way of your wishes, from first to last. It will take you to what you really and truly want.”
“That doesn’t sound so hard,” said Bastian.
“It is the most dangerous of all journeys.”
“Why…I’m not afraid.”
“That isn’t it,” Grograman rumbled. “It requires the greatest honesty and vigilance because there’s no other journey on which it’s so easy to lost yourself forever.”
“Do you mean because our wishes aren’t always good?” Bastian asked.
The lion lashed the sand he was lying on with his tail. His ears lay flat, he screwed up his nose, and his eyes flashed fire…“What do you know about wishes. How would you know what’s good and what isn’t?”
It’s an extraordinary exchange, foreshadowing the dangers Bastian will face as he searches for what it is he “really and truly want[s].” And in thinking about the idea of one’s deepest desire, and how the search for that desire can be dangerous, I thought about Saint Augustine. For Augustine, like Bastian, was a young man with a “restless” heart (1.1). Like Bastian, Augustine only found rest for his heart by “going the way of [his] wishes, from first to last” before finally discovering what he truly wanted. And like Bastian, Augustine struggles to distinguish between wishes (desires) that will lead him towards ultimate joy, and those that will lead him away from such joy.
Bastian makes one of his first wishes before he even meets Grograman. Previously teased for being overweight and “bowlegged,” Bastian wishes to be handsome and strong. Shortly after, he wishes other former weaknesses away. First, he wishes to be “tough and inured to hardship like Atreyu.” After enduring a difficult desert trek, he then wishes for a “real adventure, something calling for great courage,” which is the catalyst for his meeting with Grograman. Eventually, he realizes that his new abilities are ‘worthless’ because he is alone. He then wishes for a chance to “exhibit his talents to others, to be admired and become famous.” This leads to Bastian leaving Grograman to explore, and win fame in, the wider world of Fantastica.
Like Bastian, the youthful Augustine tries to find satisfaction in the praise and admiration of others. He describes how he “pursued the emptiness of popular glory and the applause of spectators” in his rhetorical studies (4.1). In childhood games, he notes that, "when I was clearly outplayed, I tried to win by cheating, from the vain desire for first place”(1.19). Like Bastian, Augustine wants both worldly abilities and for others to admire said abilities. Like Bastian, Augustine desires more than merely being “good” at what he does, he desires to be the best, to beat others. When Bastian wishes to be strong, he wishes specifically to be the strongest being in Fantastica. The same goes for his wishes for endurance and courage.
Interestingly, both Bastian and Augustine find that great abilities, and admiration of those abilities, come at a cost. For Augustine, the cost is the growth of sinful and degraded habits: “nothing is utterly condemnable save vice: yet I grew in vice through desire of praise” (2.3). Despite his worldly success, and the indulgence of various pleasures, Augustine still finds himself “arrogant and depressed, weary and restless” (2.2). Though Augustine, like Bastian, believes he has the right to “do anything [he] feel[s] like,” in “going the way of [his] wishes,” the journey indeed proves to be “dangerous.”
For Bastian, on the other hand, the primary danger in going the way of wishes is the loss of memory. When he wishes to be handsome, he forgets his past appearance. When he wishes to be enduring and courageous, he forgets both that “he had once been a namby-pamby, something of crybaby” and “the memory of his past timidity.” In losing his memory, Bastian is literally losing his identity, his true sense of self. For Augustine this sort of loss would be disastrous. To begin with, it is because he can remember his past wretchedness, and contrast it with his current contentment, that Augustine’s joy in his conversion is so intense. What’s more, Augustine spends much of Book 10 meditating upon the nature and importance of memory itself. For memory plays a crucial role in helping man discover what he “really and truly wants,” the “deepest secret” that he may not consciously acknowledge: his desire for relationship with God. So in losing his memory, Bastian is, by Augustine’e measure, ultimately losing his capacity for successfully completing the “most dangerous of all journeys.”
Furthermore, the unrestrained pursuit of his wishes degrades Bastian’s character, as was the case for Augustine. Bastian has “rushed from wish fulfillment to wish fulfillment, never stopping to rest. And nothing had brought him calm and contentment.” Similarly, Augustine finds that God was “mercifully hard upon me, and besprinkling all my illicit pleasures with certain elements of bitterness” (2.2). Yet, Augustine persists in chasing these illicit pleasures; adding misdeed after misdeed to burden his conscience with eventual regret. For Bastian the same inability to find rest for his restless heart also leads him to taste the “bitterness” of moral weakness in the midst of his “pleasures.”
For example Bastian forms a wish to be dangerous and feared, especially by Atreyu and Falkor, his closest friends. This wish is a result of Atreyu and Falkor’s attempts to save Bastian from further moral decay and memory loss. Atreyu even offers to wear AURYN and become Bastian’s guide, because AURYN does not affect Fantasticans the way it affects humans. Eager to show Atreyu and Falkor that he is not weak, or in need of their guidance, Bastian makes his new wish. This wish leads Bastian into conflict with an evil sorceress, Xayide, a conflict Bastian seemingly wins. However, it is revealed that Xayide purposefully surrendered to Bastian in order to gain Bastian’s confidence and wield power through her influence over him. Her influence will come close to being Bastian’s undoing.
Like Bastian, Augustine finds both solace, and later frustration, in friendship. In Book Four, Augustine describes a beloved childhood friend who has turned away from the Catholic faith as a result of Augustine’s influence. Augustine’s friend becomes deathly ill and receives the sacrament of baptism while unconscious (4.4). During a period of apparent recovery, Augustine “began to mock, assuming he would join me in mocking, the baptism” his friend had received (4.4). Far from joining in, Augustine finds that his friend “looked at me as if I had been his deadly enemy, and in a burst of independence that startled me, warned me that if I wished to continue his friend I must cease that kind of talk” (4.4). Augustine, like Bastian, resents his friend’s attempt to correct his behavior. When his friend is recovered, Augustine plans to talk his friend out of his new attitude. In what Augustine later deems to be a mercy, the friend dies before Augustine can do so. For Augustine, this moment should have been a “wake-up call,” a hint that, in pursuing his desires, he is indeed in danger of ‘losing himself forever.’ Similarly, Bastian’s conversations with Atreyu and Falkor, and their subsequent attempt to steal AURYN for Bastian’s own good, should have reminded Bastian that he is on “the most dangerous of all journeys” and is not infallible when it comes to deciding what wishes are good or bad. Yet, both Augustine and Bastian have further trials to overcome before they can begin their upward climb.
Bastian’s “conversion,” in particular, is marked by two key incidents. First is when, by the evvil counsel of Xayide, Bastian makes his worst wish yet. He wishes to rule Fantastica and fashion it according to his own desires. Atreyu and Falkor, still trying to save Bastian from himself, lead a rebellion that prevnts Bastian’s coronation, but ends with Bastian seriously wounding Atreyu. The second key incident is when Bastian, angrily pursuing the wounded Atreyu, discovers the City of Forgotten Emperors. It is populated by humans who previously visited Fantastica, wished to become its rulers, and subsequently lost every memory of their past. They are doomed to live a purposeless and changeless existence, absent of any personal identity. Bastian realizes how, in failing to practice the “honesty and vigilance” Grograman recommended, he has indeed come close to losing himself forever. His few remaining memories were preserved only by the actions of Atreyu and Falkor.
Augustine, though his conversion is driven by an intellectual element absent in Bastian’s journey, also finds himself increasingly disgusted with his own moral failures. Like Bastian, Augustine finds that the intercession and advice of those he once rejected proves instrumental in redirecting his journey. For Augustine, this includes his holy mother, Monica, and the learned and saintly bishop, Ambrose. Previously, Augustine had found his mother’s advice about maintaining sexual integrity “womanish” and says he “should have blushed to obey” her (2.3). In regards to Ambrose, he found Ambrose’s eloquence and learning astonishing, having previously rejected Christian beliefs (and teachers) as intellectually inferior to other philosophies.
Thus, both Bastian and Augustine, through the help of friends, begin a new stage in their journey to discover what they “really and truly want.” They both chase new and more sophisticated “wishes” (desires) to do so. For Bastian, one of these new wishes includes the wish to be loved: “He no longer wanted to be the greatest, strongest, or cleverest. He had left all that far behind. He longed to be loved just as he was, good or bad, handsome or ugly, clever or stupid, with all his faults.” As a result of this wish, he meets Dame Eyola, a humanoid plant, who showers Bastian with maternal affection. However, the greatest example of Dame Eyola’s love for Bastian is to provide him with crucial guidance for his journey. When Bastian laments all the mistakes he has made up until this point, she reminds him that, “you went the way of wishes, and that is never straight. You went the long way around, but that was your way.” She informs him that the only way he can return to the human world is to find the fountain from which springs the Water of Life, and “there’s no simple way of getting there.”
Like Bastian, Augustine finds that his “delight” in loving and being loved by other beings is a desire that can lead him on the right path, at least partially so (2.2). His love for his common-law wife inspires him to remain faithful to her and refrain from other sexual misdeeds for the duration of their relationship. His love and admiration for various friends, and their examples of conversion, strengthen his own resolve to convert when he is struggling with the conflict between his “two wills, one old, one new, one carnal, one spiritual” (8.5). And, as discussed, Augustine, like Bastian, is helped on his journey by motherly love. Furthermore, Dame Eyola’s advice to Bastian echoes some of Augustine’s own thoughts about his tumultuous journey to what he really and truly wants, relationship with God. In one of the Confessions’ most moving passages, Augustine addresses his greatest desire, God: “Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient, so new…[I] fell upon those lovely things that Thou hast made…I was kept from Thee by those things, yet had they not been in Thee, they would not have been at all” (10.27). Augustine’s “way of wishes,” was also a journey that went “the long way around” and was indeed far from “straight.” Yet, he ultimately found that God was speaking to him in his disordered desires for those created things that he sought to enjoy as replacements for his “deepest” wish: his wish for God himself.
The Neverending Story is far from being a work of theology, the way Confessions ultimately is. It is first and foremost a work of fantasy, a work written to entertain.2 Therefore Bastian does not discover, as Augustine does, that his deepest wish is to love and serve God. However, The Neverending Story, as a story, is still a tale of conversion. As part of that conversion Bastian, like Augustine, finds his final wish is “different in every way from all his previous wishes.” Bastian’s final wish, and ultimate longing, is “to be capable of loving.” Rather than directing his longing to love towards God the father, as Augustine does, Bastian directs his longing to love towards his human father. Up until this point, Bastian’s father has withdrawn from Bastian, overcome with grief at the death of Bastian’s mother.3
In making his final wish, Bastian ultimately arrives at the fountain of the Water of Life. There he meets Atreyu and Falkor for the last time, and freely gives them AURYN. Atreyu and Falkor, having forgiven Bastian for his misdeeds, play a crucial role in ensuring that Bastian is permitted to bathe in the Water of Life. In order to do so, Bastian must surrender all the previous ‘wishes’ he made. Gone is his beauty, his strength, his courage, his wisdom. He stands naked “before the great golden bowl, at the center of which the Water of Life leapt high into the air like a crystal tree.”
Augustine must also surrender the “vanities” of his previous life in order to enter the true Water of Life, the regenerative waters of baptism. It is a cleansing that will allow Augustine to fulfill his greatest wish, the wish to love God as a true son. It is Bastian’s cleansing that allows him to fulfill his greatest wish, the wish to love his earthly father. Similar to Bastian, Augustine finds the final surrender of his previous ‘wishes’ (reputation, fame, sexual indulgence) difficult. When Augustine does finally surrender these lesser desires,
“how lovely I suddenly found it to be free from the loveliness of those vanities, so that now it was a joy to renounce what I had been so afraid to lose. For [God] cast them out of me and took their place in me..[God] who [is] sweeter than all pleasures” (9.1).
Like Augustine, Bastian discovers a greater joy in renouncing what he had previously feared to lose. As he bathes in the fountain:
“joy filled him from head to foot, the joy of living and the joy of being himself. He was newborn. And the best part of it was that he was now the very person he wanted to be…because now he knew there there were thousands and thousands of forms of joy in the world, but that all were essentially one and the same, namely, the joy of being able to love.”
Both Augustine and Bastian, freed from their previous, unsatisfactory ‘wishes,’ and the moral defects resulting from the pursuit of those wishes, are made whole and healthy. They will no longer will chase after these former “vanities” or ground their identities in them. For both Augustine and Bastian, it is love that is the ultimate source of their newfound joy and freedom. For Augustine, this love is God Himself. For Bastian, this love is a human love.4
After bathing in the Water of Life, Bastian returns to the human world and tells his father the story of his adventures. Bastian, lamenting that he couldn’t bring his father the Water of Life as he had hoped, looks up to see his father (for the first time ever) weeping in front of Bastian. In that moment, Bastian “knew that he had brought him the Water of Life after all.” Bastian’s rebirth leads to his father’s “conversion” from selfish apathy, and a rebirth of their relationship. And this rebirth is brought about by Bastian’s ability to tell his story, to witness to the experiences he has undergone. Similarly, Augustine’s own journey on “the way of wishes” leads him to become a great preacher and writer. The story of his journey, his Confessions, continues to inspire others to convert and seek the “Water of Life” to this day.
As I stated at the outset of this piece, my comparison between these texts, separated by vast differences of history, genre, authorship, and purpose, is definitely an odd one. Furthermore, the differences in Bastian and Augustine’s journeys, and ultimate ‘destinations,’ cannot and should not be ignored. However, I found the process of diving into my initial strange idea, that a work of children’s literature can be interpreted in the light of a spiritual classic, an edifying process. For I was reminded that God is always willing to speak His truth and His love to us, even (and maybe especially) through the most humble of mediums. And I pray that, someday, when my children come to read The Neverending Story themselves, they too will be reminded that their deepest wish is to love Love itself. And reminded of this truth, I pray they will rejoice in the knowledge that they have already been given the power to do so by their immersion in the true Water of Life.
Both these texts were read in translation. For The Neverending Story, it was Ralph Manheim;s translation. For Augustine, it was the second edition of F.J. Sheed’s translation.
It’s capitalized in the book, so I will do so throughout this post
It would be interesting to reflect on Tolkien’s ideas about Fairy-Stories here, but this post is long enough as is. So I’ll restrain myself, and direct you to read Tolkien’s famous lecture instead. Because it’s better than anything I will ever write myself: https://coolcalvary.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf
I don’t think it is a coincidence that Bastian wants to love his father, and God the Father is the first person of the Trinity/one of the first ways people relate to God in general.However, it is an idea that can be pushed too hard. God does not need our love the way Bastian’s father needs his love to recover from his grief, and God the Father never neglects his children the way Bastian’s human father does.
This is another key point of divergence/place where pushing my comparison too far can lead to a misreading of one or both of these texts. For Augustine, with his focus on how love for lesser beings/things can become obstacles to loving God, The Neverending Story’s focus on human love would be potentially problematic.