Orual narrates C.S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces.
Published in 1956, the novel retells the ancient Cupid and Psyche story from the perspective of Orual, the ruler of the fictional kingdom of Glome. Orual is Psyche’s older half-sister, and her account examines love, possessiveness, faith, jealousy, and the difficulty of seeing oneself honestly.
Lewis based the book on the myth recorded by Apuleius in The Golden Ass, but he deliberately changed the narrative viewpoint. In the classical story, Psyche is the central human figure; in Lewis’s version, Orual’s first-person voice controls the account and gradually exposes the limits of her understanding.
Readers sometimes confuse Orual with Psyche because Psyche is the figure associated with the divine-marriage episode. Orual is the narrator and the character whose interpretation of events gives the novel its distinctive psychological and theological force.