The Screwtape Letters - Plot Overview

Plot Overview

The Screwtape Letters comprises thirty-one letters written by a senior demon named Screwtape to his nephew, Wormwood, a younger and less experienced demon, who is charged with guiding a man toward "Our Father Below" (Devil / Satan) and away from "the Enemy" (God).

After the second letter, the Patient converts to Christianity, and Wormwood is chastised for allowing this to happen. Screwtape notes however, that they have the advantage of distraction, which could potentially dull his new faith. A striking contrast is formed between Wormwood and Screwtape during the rest of the book. Wormwood is depicted through Screwtape's letters as much closer to what conventional wisdom has said about demons, i.e., wanting to tempt his patient into extravagantly wicked and deplorable sins and constantly writing about the war that is going on for the latter half of the book. Screwtape, on the other hand, is not interested in getting the patient to commit anything spectacularly evil, saying that "the safest path to hell is the gradual one." He considers it a demon's primary goal to befuddle, confuse, and eventually corrupt a person rather than to tempt.

In Letter VIII, Screwtape explains to his protégé the different agendas that God and the devils have for the human race: "We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons." With this end in mind, Screwtape urges Wormwood in Letter VI to promote passivity and irresponsibility in the Patient: "(God) wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them."

Lewis's use of this "correspondence" is both varied and hard-hitting. With his own views on theology, Lewis covers areas as diverse as sex, love, pride, gluttony, and war. Lewis, an Oxford and Cambridge scholar himself, suggests in his work that even intellectuals are not impervious to the influence of such demons, especially being led towards placated acceptance of the "Historical Point of View" (Letter XXVII).

In Letter XXII, after several weeks of attempts to find a licentious woman for the Patient, and when Screwtape receives a painful punishment for a secret he divulges to Wormwood about God's genuine love for humanity, the irate Screwtape notes that the Patient has fallen in love with a Christian girl, and he is enraged over this mistake that Wormwood has allowed. Toward the end of this letter, Screwtape becomes so incensed that he turns into a large centipede, mimicking a similar transformation that John Milton included in Book X of Paradise Lost, where the demons found that they had been turned into snakes.

In the last letter, it emerges that the Patient has been killed during an air raid (World War II having broken out between the fourth and fifth letters), and has gone to Heaven. Wormwood is to be punished for letting a soul 'slip through his fingers' by being handed over to the fate that would have awaited his patient had he been successful: the consumption of his spiritual essence by the other demons. Screwtape responds to his nephew's desperate final letter by tauntingly assuring him that he may expect just as much assistance from his "increasingly and ravenously affectionate" uncle as Screwtape would expect from Wormwood were their situations reversed, paralleling the situation where Wormwood himself turned his uncle over to Satan for making a religiously positive remark that would offend him.