Who is the protagonist of C.S. Lewis’s novel Out of the Silent Planet?
Answer
Elwin Ransom
Elwin Ransom is the protagonist of C.S. Lewis’s novel Out of the Silent Planet.
Ransom is a Cambridge philologist who is kidnapped and taken aboard a spacecraft bound for Malacandra, the planet humans call Mars. His knowledge of language becomes crucial as he encounters the planet’s intelligent species and learns that Earth is regarded as a fallen or “silent” world.
The 1938 novel begins Lewis’s Space Trilogy and establishes Ransom as a scholar-hero rather than a conventional soldier or explorer. Lewis drew on contemporary interest in space travel but rejected the idea that alien worlds should merely duplicate Earth’s political conflicts. Mark Studdock belongs mainly to the third novel, That Hideous Strength.