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Copywork
About This Passage
Screwtape diagnoses the real cause of bad temper in the tired: not fatigue itself but 'unexpected demands' and the slide from 'disappointment' into a 'sense of injury' built on what we assume we have a right to. He also reveals what the devils fear — the 'humbled and gentle weariness' that arrives once a person stops grasping for relief. Copying this passage helps a student see how expectation and self-pity, not exhaustion, manufacture anger.
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 c...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct Screwtape's thirtieth letter to Wormwood in sequence: his fury that the patient endured the first raid bravely while feeling 'no pride'; Hell's results-only 'justice'; the plan to exploit fatigue with 'false hopes' and a short 'reasonable period' of endurance; and the long campaign over the meaning of the word 'real.' Then state the single corruption you would use to organize the whole letter, and explain which tactic you find most dangerous.
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape rages that the patient is 'very frightened' and 'thinks himself a great coward,' yet 'has done everything his duty demanded and perhaps a bit more,' feeling 'no pride.' Why can a man be genuinely brave at the very moment he is most certain he is a coward, and what does that tell us about whether courage lives in feeling or in action? Which part of the letter to Wormwood most helps you decide?
- Screwtape's plan here works, he says, 'as in the problem of cowardice'—the earlier trial of the patient's courage. How does this letter's attack through fatigue and 'false hopes' deepen or change the way Screwtape went after that courage before, and what has stayed the same in his method? Point to the moments in this letter to Wormwood that show the connection.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Impossible to cure, fix, or undo.
Item 2
A fretful, irritable crossness over small things.
Item 3
Seeming to contradict itself yet possibly true.
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Critical Thinking
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