The end of Dawn Treader was when I clocked that Aslan was Jesus -- the lamb turned into a lion, and I went "ohhhhhhh." Child me always thought that was a bit of a cheat, though. It's not that I felt betrayed by the discovery of baked-in Christianity or allegory, exactly, but I felt that a self-contained numinous god-lion was far more interesting.
I do think there are parts of The Last Battle that stand alone, and they were my favorite parts -- Tirian and Jewel and Eustace and Jill, basically, and Jill and Eustace's return to Narnia with their feet under them at last, and grappling with how to save something beloved and dear and huge like a country and its people when you can't but you can't not try. Those were the bits I read and reread over again, and still have lines from memorized. But I'd always skip past the Shift and Puzzle bits -- they made me too mad for poor Puzzle -- and sometimes I'd stop before the end, even if some of the end was beautifully written and has stuck with me too. But its happy ending depends on the allegory being accepted, and you're right that for the rest of the stories, the happy ending works without that.
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I do think there are parts of The Last Battle that stand alone, and they were my favorite parts -- Tirian and Jewel and Eustace and Jill, basically, and Jill and Eustace's return to Narnia with their feet under them at last, and grappling with how to save something beloved and dear and huge like a country and its people when you can't but you can't not try. Those were the bits I read and reread over again, and still have lines from memorized. But I'd always skip past the Shift and Puzzle bits -- they made me too mad for poor Puzzle -- and sometimes I'd stop before the end, even if some of the end was beautifully written and has stuck with me too. But its happy ending depends on the allegory being accepted, and you're right that for the rest of the stories, the happy ending works without that.