8thLiterature
4th Quarter Literature Elements Test & Screwtape Letters Test Review
Know the following Literary Elements.
Simile
Metaphor
Round character?
Alliteration
Flat Character
Foreshadowing
Conflict
Point of View
Irony
Setting
Negative and Positive Turns
Theme
Hyperbole
Plot
Characterization
Static character
Allusion
Personification
Epitaph
Dynamic character
Symbol
Stereotype
Foil
Protagonist
Onomatopoeia
Eternal Truths
Communication Statements
Bible in a Nutshell
Leave people/things better than you found them
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely
You can change your “setting” anytime you want to
It is unfair to compare
Who is the main character in this story?
Who is the main character in this story? – Screwtape
Know the story line – Uncle demon writing to nephew demon giving advice on how to tempt his patient
Patient becomes Christian, gets entangled with worldly friends, has a second conversion
What kind of novel is this?
What are the main themes?
Preface
What are the two errors a person can fall into when it comes to demons
Letter 1
Key idea: Fuddle the patient
Argument vs. propaganda
“The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle on to the Enemy’s own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below.” P. 2
Letter 2 – Becomes a Christian
Key idea: Using the church as an ally – “Your patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that nay of those neighbors sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, that patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.” P. 6
Remember it is “Unfair to compare”
“All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question ‘if I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?’” P. 8
Letter 3
Key idea: Settled habit of mutual annoyance – “You want to get in first. Keep in close touch with our colleague Glubose who is in charge of the mother, and build up between you in that house a good settled habit of mutual annoyance; daily pinpricks.” P. 11
Letter 4 – Prayer
Key idea: Keep them from Enemy – “Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills.” P.16
Letter 5 – The War in Europe
Key idea: War is not that good for demons – “One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless. In wartime not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever.” P.24
Letter 6 – War continued
Key idea: Maximum uncertainty, suspense and anxiety – “There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.” P. 25
Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the Will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really to us.” P. 28
Letter 7 – To keep the patient in ignorance of your own existence or not
Key idea: Myth of demons having horns and tails - “If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.” P. 32
Another key idea is that of extremism: “All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged.” P.32
Subtle strategy of deceit: “Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the ‘cause’, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favor of the British war-effort or of Pacifism.” “Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.” P.34
Letter 8 – Law of Undulation
Key idea: “As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore is undulation –the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty.
Key: Humans as food – He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into our, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food: He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.” Pages 38 & 39
Letter 9 – Pleasures – tempting during the trough times
Key idea: “Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has . Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable is the formula…
To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return – that is what really gladdens Our Father’s heart.” P.44
A better way – “If you can once get him to the point of thinking that ‘religion is all very well up to a point’, you can feel quite happy about his soul. A moderated (lukewarm) religion is as good for us as no religion at all—and more amusing.” P. 46
Letter 10 – Finds worldly friends for the patient
Key idea: Bad company corrupts good morals – Puritanical = extremely or excessively strict in matters of morals and religion
Letter 11 – Three kinds of laughter – fun, joke and flippancy
Key idea: “Humor is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life.”
“Cruelty is shameful—unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man’s damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke.” Pages 55-56
Flippant = Treating serious matters with inappropriate light-heartedness or lack of respect
“If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armor-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy; it ens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it…”
Letter 12 – The patient is being entangled slowly and without knowing it
Key idea: “It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts…” P.60-61
Letter 13 – Man slips through his fingers – has 2nd conversion
Key idea: Screwtape’s strategy – “Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel…” P. 67
Letter 14 – Humility vs. Pride – Make him aware of his humility. Make him keep his mind on himself!
Key idea: Make him prideful of his humility
Letter 15 – Want the patient to live in the future
Key idea: If the patient lives in the present he touches eternity – Keep the man in the future, both hopeful (fantasizing) and anxious. “God doesn’t want us to give the future our hearts, to place our treasures in it. We do.” P.77
Letter 16 – Attitude toward church attendance
Key idea: First and foremost keep the man church hopping, but if he stays in one church get him into a church that is full of cliques that fight over meaningless things like the color of the carpet in the fellowship hall.
Letter 17 -
Key idea: Gluttony is really greed and selfishness – not necessarily eating too much. Phil. 3:19 …their god is their stomach
Letter 18 – Man’s dilemma concerning – Only options: Abstinence and Monogomy
Key idea: Hell’s philosophy = competition, Heaven’s philosophy = cooperation
False belief – being in love is the only thing that makes marriage either happy or holy
Letter 19
Key idea: Demons can’t comprehend love
To love or not to love isn’t the point – “Nothing matters at all except the tendency of a given state of mind, in given circumstances, to move a particular patient at a particular moment nearer to the Enemy or nearer to us.” Pages 101 and 102
Letter 20
Key idea: Get the patient to marry the wrong mate – someone who will make following Christ very difficult
Letter 21 –
-Ownership
Key idea: Ownership – “And all the time the joke is that the word ‘Mine’ in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either Our Father or the Enemy will say ‘Mine’ of each thing that exists, and specially of each man. They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong—certainly not to them, whatever happens.” Pages 114 and 115
Letter 22 – Man falls in love with a Christian – Screwtape transforms into a large centipede after ranting against the music and silence of heaven and how the noise of hell will shout down it down in the end.
Key idea: God is a – “He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are ‘pleasures for evermore’. Ugh! I don’t think He has the least inkling of that high and austere mystery to which we rise in the Miserific Vision.” Page118
Letter 23 – Spoiled saint
Key idea: Failed to tempt his the World and the Flesh – “The World and the Flesh have failed us; a third Power remains. And success of this third kind is the most glorious of all. A spoiled saint, a Pharisee, an inquisitor, or a magician, makes better sport in hell than a mere common tyrant or debauchee.” P.123
Letter 24 – Inner Ring
Key idea: Spiritual pride in his little Christian group – “The great thing is to make Christianity a mystery religion in which he feels himself one of the initiates.” P.133
Letter 25 – The horror of the same old thing
Key idea: “Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce glutton, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty(trends, fads, etc.).” Page 136
“The Enemy loves platitudes. Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions; is it righteous? Is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking ‘Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?’ they will neglect the relevant questions. And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke th future to help them to make.” Pages 138-139
Letter 26 – Unselfishness replaces charity
Key idea: “The grand problem is that of ‘Unselfishness’. Note, once again, the admirable work of our Philological Arm in substituting the negative unselfishness for the Enemy’s positive Charity. Thanks to this you can, from the very outset, teach a man to surrender benefits not that others may be happy in having them but that he may be unselfish in forgoing them.” P. 141
‘If people knew how much ill-feeling Unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit’; and again, ‘she’s the sort of woman who lives for others—you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.” Page 145 – (Marie on Everyone Love Raymond)
Letter 27 – Petitionary prayer
Key idea: “On the seemingly pious ground that ‘praise and communion with God is true prayer’, humans can often be lured into direct disobedience to the Enemy who (in His usual flat, commonplace, uninteresting way) has definitely told them to pray for their daily bread and the recovery of their sick.” P.148
“Don’t forget to use the ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ argument. If the thing he prays for doesn’t happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don’t work; if it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical cause which led up to it, and ‘therefore it would have happened anyway’, and thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective.” P.148
Letter 28 – Time as an ally to knit the man to this earth
Key idea: “But, if only he can be kept alive, you have time itself for your ally. The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather. You see, it is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their live and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it—all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition (abrasion- slow destruction – wearing away).
If, on the other hand, the middle years prove prosperous, our position is even stronger. Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is ‘finding his place in it’, while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth, which is just what we want.” Pages 154-155
Letter 29 – Germans are ing
Key idea: Make the man a coward, or brave with pride coming after, or make him the Germans – Can’t produce virtue of courage.
Letter 30 – Fatigue
Key idea: “It is not fatigue simply as such that produces the anger, but unexpected demands on a man already tired. Whatever men expect they soon come to think they have a right to; the sense of disappointment can, with very little skill on our part, be turned into a sense of injury. It is after men have given in to the irremediable, after they have despaired of relief and ceased to think even a half-hour ahead, that the dangers of humbled and gentle weariness begin. To produce the best results from the patient’s fatigue, therefore, you must feed him with false hopes.” Page 166
Letter 31 – Patient is lost to a ing and slips through his fingers into heaven
Key idea: The blessed transition from life to life everlasting – “…what he felt at that moment; as if a scab had fallen from an old sore, as if he shuffled off for good and all a defiled, wet, clinging garment. By Hell, it is misery enough to see them in their mortal days taking off dirtied and uncomfortable clothes and splashing in hot water and giving little grunts of pleasure—streching their eased limbs. What, then, of this final stripping, this complete cleansing?”
“Did you mark how naturally—as if he’d been born for it—the earth-born vermin entered the new life? How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous? I know what the creature was saying to itself! ‘Yes. Of course. It always was like this. All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and forcing you into a kind of bottle-neck till, at the very moment when you thought you must be crushed, behold! You were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well. The extraction hurt more and more and then the tooth was out. The dream became a nightmare and then you woke. You die and die and then you are beyond . How could I ever have doubted it?” Pages 172-173
Essay Question: What are three strategies of satan’s that you have discovered in this novel, and how are you going to defend against them?
