Un-man

*"[Weston's] body did not reach its squatting position by the normal movements of a man ... [although i]t was impossible to point to any particular motion which was definitely non-human. Ransom had the sense of watching an imitation of living motions which had been very well studied and was technically correct: but somehow it lacked the master touch. And he was chilled with an inarticulate, night-nursery horror of the thing he had to deal with — the man-aged corpse, the bogey, the Unman."* - *Perelandra*
The **Un-man**, or the **Unman**, also known as the **Life Force**, **Force**, and **Spirit** by Edward Rolles Weston, the **Prince of Darkness**, the **Temptor**, the **Enemy**, the **Bent Eldil**, and **The Empirical Bogey** by Elwin Ransom, and the **Evil One** by Tinidril, was a Dark Eldil who possessed Dr. Weston's body on the planet Perelandra. A common misconception is that the Un-man is The Bent One of Earth, but he/it is actually just a lesser bent eldil, probably of high rank. Either the Un-man is a servant of the Bent One, or he is an Eldil on his own side. Ransom says to him/it, "*I know what you are. Which of them doesn't matter...*" The Un-man shows super-human brilliance in debate (though when "off-duty" he displays moronic, asinine behaviour and petty cruelty) and moreover appears never to need sleep.

The Un-man wreaks destruction upon the planet Perelandra as soon as he appears. On the Floating Islands, he starts rending the local giant frogs to pieces and ripping feathers off birds. He also tries to persuade the Green Lady (the new Eve) to disobey Maleldil by spending the night on the Fixed Island, and also to corrupt her through various reasonable sounding philosophies, while Ransom pleads with her to resist the Un-man. Very occasionally Weston can be seen through the Un-man but has clearly lost control, it is impossible to distinguish whether anything he says is Weston or the Devil working through him. Indeed, Ransom concludes:

Elwin Ransom manages to pursue the Un-man to the Fixed Island. Eventually Ransom, realizing that he cannot defeat the Un-man with argument — and prompted by Maleldil — physically attacks the Un-man, and both are badly wounded in the ensuing fight, but neither can prevail. In an interlude, Weston's consciousness appears to resurface, dismaying Ransom with the confused horror of Hell:

Ransom finally kills Weston in the tunnels beneath Perelandra's Fixed Island and rolls his body into a volcanic abyss.

Ransom, having carved a monument to the great physicist into the wall outside the caverns, makes his way up to a mountaintop, to meet the grateful Lady and the King of the new world.

## Nature

Ransom comes to the realization that for demons, intelligence is a trait that they can put on or remove at will--rather like clothes they wear rather than an innate characteristic. And based on the Un-Man's petty behaviour whenever he isn't "working", it is clear he would rather be intelligent as little as possible. At one point, Ransom even specifically thinks that he would much rather face a Mephistopheles-type of demon than the thing he has to put up with. The Un-man is so evil that even to look at its face can shock an unprepared human to pass out, and while it is a highly intelligent tempter with plans spanning the Field of Arbol, it derives at least as much pleasure from torturing animal life to death.

Lewis also wanted to make the point that, having renounced the source of all good, evil has to renounce all good things, with intelligence being one of them - except when convenient for evil purposes. The Un-man's philosophical/ontological position is inherently insane, like a man sawing off the very tree limb he's sitting on.

## Death

Ultimately, Elwin Ransom realizes he cannot reason with the being, or keep it away from Tinidril, hence he too succumbs to violence. Ransom himself thought this particular solution seemed crass, until he realized that his opponent was playing similarly dirty. The Un-man was using manipulative rhetoric to make his point, and was abusing his lack of need for sleep, in order to physically wear down his opposition. Ransom also felt the Un-man's death could also be considered Values Resonance, since he was saving a new Eden from becoming another fallen world like his native Earth. It was not Ransom's first course of action, but he realised there was no other way. In this world, it is the evil force, rather than Urendi Maleldil, who dies, and thus there is no need for an atonement. Ransom came to this conclusion only after being dragged through weeks of argument by the Un-man. It also required tremendous courage. Ransom fully expected to die, as he was a mortal entering physical combat with a demon. He quickly discovered, to his relief, that it was, physically, one middle-aged scholar against another.

## Influences

The Un-man shares some common ground with J. R. R. Tolkien's work. In the *Lord of the Rings'* the evil ring (along with Gollum who is obsessed with it) end up in the lava of Mount Doom.

The Un-man's fate also resembles that of the Beast/Satan in Revelation 20:10 in the Bible "And the Devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever."

## Cultural references

Christian horror punk band Blaster the Rocket Man, whose lyrics frequently subsist on monster themes, borrowed heavily from The Space Trilogy in their album *The Monster Who Ate Jesus*. Their song "Ransom vs. The Unman" is a direct retelling of the struggle between Ransom and the Un-man.

## Quotations

* "*He did not look like a sick man: but he looked very like a dead one.The face which he raised from torturing the frog had that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it.... It looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile... The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; it was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with a horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence.*"

## See also

* Adam and Eve
* Bible
* Deeper Life
* Eldila
* National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments
* Stingingmen
* The Bent One
* Tower of Babel
* Upward Path
* Urendi Maleldil

## External links

* The Brazen Smuggler: Biblical Allusions in C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra
* Demon Possession—IN SPACE! Lewis’s Perelandra as Exorcism Narrative
* The Un-man at LitCharts
* The Un-man in CS Lewis' Perelandra]