Novel: The Screwtape Letters

Premise and Form
C. S. Lewis frames the novel as a series of thirty-one letters from Screwtape, a senior tempter in Hell’s civil service, to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood. Their subject is a single Englishman, referred to only as the Patient, living through World War II. Because the correspondence flows one way, readers experience the story through Screwtape’s sardonic voice and his professional advice on sabotaging a human soul. God is called “the Enemy,” Satan “Our Father Below,” and Christian virtue is treated as the opposing side’s tactic, creating a sustained comic inversion that sharpens the moral and theological portrait.

Narrative Arc
At the outset Wormwood is urged to keep the Patient preoccupied with ordinary life and vague skepticism. This plan collapses when the Patient converts to Christianity. Screwtape pivots: do not try to stop churchgoing; hollow it out. He counsels petty irritations with the Patient’s mother, fussy distraction in prayer, and a taste for fashionable clergy and partisan factions within the church. As war intensifies, Screwtape presses Wormwood to exploit fear, hatred, and political extremes, yet warns that either pacifism or militarism will serve if it becomes idolatrous. He lays out the “law of Undulation”, human spiritual life rises and falls, and explains that low periods are prime time for subtle, habitual sins. A near-death scare produces a spasm of sincere prayer that enrages Screwtape; in one outburst he morphs into a centipede, a slapstick glimpse of demonic instability. Later, the Patient falls in love with a devout young woman whose home radiates a charity the devils dread. Wormwood tries sensual temptations, while Screwtape recommends the safer poison of spiritual pride, turn humility into self-consciousness, make goodness priggish. Despite these efforts, the Patient matures into a quieter, steadier faith. During an air raid he is killed; at that moment, Screwtape reports the arrival of angels and the Patient’s confident turning toward the Enemy. Wormwood has lost his soul to Heaven, and Screwtape, with bureaucratic menace, hints he will now consume his nephew.

Temptation Strategies
Screwtape’s advice maps a psychology of temptation in small things. Keep the Patient’s mind on foggy abstractions or “real life,” never on true arguments. Encourage prayers aimed at mental pictures rather than God. Cultivate peevishness and fussiness, the “gluttony of delicacy”, rather than gross excess. Push “Christianity and…” agendas so that social or ideological zeal crowds out charity. Make humility performative, repentance despairing, and joy anxious. Above all, distract: direct him to imagine future horrors rather than do present duties with patience and gratitude. Pleasure itself, Screwtape admits, belongs to the Enemy; devils can only twist it.

Themes and Tone
The book’s enduring charm lies in its blend of wit, moral seriousness, and shrewd observation. Hell is portrayed as a spidery bureaucracy of memos, quotas, and cannibal hierarchies, parodying modern managerial culture. Human beings are “amphibians,” caught between flesh and spirit, time and eternity, and their freedom makes genuine love possible but risky. War appears morally ambiguous through demonic eyes: useful for terror and cruelty, dangerous for courage and self-forgetfulness. The satire pricks religious pretension as sharply as secular smugness, using the demonic perspective to reveal the everyday ways people drift from love of God and neighbor.

Ending and Significance
The Patient’s sudden death resolves the narrative with a paradoxical calm: the devils’ carefully laid tactics dissolve in the face of grace, and the senior tempter’s fury becomes self-consuming. The novel stands as a compact anatomy of temptation and discipleship, more domestic than apocalyptic, and its inverted voice makes familiar virtues feel newly luminous. Later editions often append “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” a separate satire that extends the bureaucratic inferno, but the 1942 letters already deliver a complete, bitterly comic catechism in reverse.