In C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, the demon narrator refers to his human target only as “the Patient.” The Patient is a man whom the junior tempter Wormwood is trying to lead away from Christian faith and moral change.
The book is presented as a series of letters from Screwtape, an experienced demon, to Wormwood. This reversed viewpoint lets Lewis satirize temptation, pride, distraction, resentment, and self-deception. The reader never receives the Patient’s personal name, which makes him an ordinary representative of human spiritual struggle rather than a fully individualized protagonist.
The work began as a wartime series in The Guardian and was published as a book in 1942. The Patient should not be confused with Wormwood, the demon assigned to him, or with Screwtape, the senior adviser writing the letters.