In C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, what is Screwtape?

In C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape is a senior demon.

The 1942 book is presented as a series of letters from Screwtape, an experienced demon, to his younger nephew Wormwood. Screwtape gives advice about tempting a human patient and preventing that person from becoming a Christian. The fictional correspondence lets Lewis examine moral weakness through irony and reversed language.

Screwtape is not the human protagonist and is not a benevolent supernatural guide. The book’s humor comes partly from presenting demonic activity as an organized bureaucracy whose officials discuss temptation in a formally professional tone.

Lewis wrote the work during the Second World War, and it first appeared in installments in the Anglican newspaper The Guardian before publication in book form. The letters’ demonic viewpoint is a literary device, not a statement that Screwtape is a narrator Lewis treats as morally trustworthy.