The son of a village tinker with little schooling, John Bunyan experienced a tremendous religious conflict that led him to write a book in two parts that would become one of the most popular of all time, translated into dozens of languages. In composing his allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, he ironically achieved what those far more steeped in the literary tradition of classical romance could not. Eschewing romantic couplets, idealized figures, and fantasized landscapes, he adopted a colloquial prose to produce a tale containing a brilliant illusion of reality—an absolute requirement of the genre later to be called the novel. Thus, his work proved seminal to the development of the British novel.
Writers of Bunyan’s 17th-century era remained caught between the challenge of producing a new genre and their adherence to a tradition that refused to characterize humans engaging in acts clearly inherent to a lower, more animalistic nature than the romance tradition allowed. Because Bunyan remained ignorant of that conflict, he could write undistracted. While burdened with a didactic message and distinct moral goal, The Pilgrim’s Progress also depicted a flawed hero who encouraged the reader’s identification—later inherent to the novel. A second crucial component aligning Bunyan’s work with the novel was its convincing suggestion of reality. Finally, Bunyan’s use of characters and events to suggest moral qualities resulted in the production of a consistently unified body, prefiguring the unity that would prove so important to defining the novel.
It was partially the absence of artifice that allowed Bunyan’s Part I of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) to be so accessible. He had proved the value of his natural style in his 1666 autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, where he claimed in his preface that he could have “steeped” his writing “into a style much higher” and “adorned all things more than here I have seemed to do,” but resisted a type of “play” in order to “be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was.” He continued that approach in Pilgrim’s Progress, allowing readers to enjoy as well as learn from that book. In his description of a man on a journey toward truth, Bunyan adopted a classical plot format familiar from Homer’s The Odyssey. His protagonist Christian undergoes all of the challenges present in the classical quest, including personal loss, a call to adventure, the use of various guides, a descent into darkness, emergence from darkness to continue his quest, the encountering of monsters, and even a return home—although home is redefined as the heavenly home available to those who best life’s temptations, experience conversion, and cross the river, long a symbol of new life.
Advancing reader identification, Bunyan adopts the element most essential to the quest: the vision/dream world. His entire story takes place as a dream, suggesting to readers that the dream may directly relate to the dreamer himself, as had their own cultural mythology long before psychologists such as Carl Jung expressed it as theory. Not only might they identify with Christian, but they also could, by extension, identify with Bunyan himself. In addition, Christian’s lack of a name in the opening of Part I advances reader identification through its characterization of the protagonist as any man. Even when his name is made clear, it places Christian within a group—that of the followers of Christ—failing to individualize him. Furthermore, when the story opens, Christian is engaged in the act of reading, yet another suggestion that Bunyan’s audience will find much in the tale to which they may relate.
Christian’s book tells him he presently lives in the City of Destruction, where he is condemned not only to death but also to judgment. Both literally and figuratively bearing a burden, he leaves his home and family, who refuse to join him, to embark on a lengthy journey, helped by the figures Faithful and Hopeful. They encounter many other figures, both bad and good, including the monstrous Apollyon, killed by Christian; Lord Hategood, responsible for Faithful’s execution; Giant Despair; Mr. Worldly Wiseman; Ignorance; Talkative; and By-ends. In Part II, published in 1684, Christian’s family joins him, bringing their neighbor Mercy. During the continued journey, they meet additional allegorical characters, including Mr. Ready-to-halt, Mr. Honest, Mr. Stand-fast, and Mr. Despondency with his daughter Much-afraid.
In arguing that The Pilgrim’s Progress influenced the novel’s development, critics suggest it moves beyond the traditional Christian allegory familiar to audiences through morality plays to introduce a strong sense of reality in its setting as well as in the symbolic characters themselves. Critic Dorothy Van Ghent explains that Bunyan uses “physical topography,” such as his muddy Slough, the Hill Difficulty, the well-used highway that acts as a gathering place for verbal exchange, valleys, mountains, and bogs, to bring a note of recognition to readers. She extends her point to argue that without such sharp evocation of physical setting, Bunyan could not have suggested its psychological effect on the travelers. Scene and “atmosphere” exist not only outside the pilgrims but also inside, evoking a “spiritual topography.” Readers make their own connections between physical circumstances and morality, without Bunyan’s needing to insert an explanation, prefiguring the use of more subtle and suggestive symbolism that would become a crucial element in fiction. His artistry in creating familiar imagery evoked a spontaneous multiple reading for multiple meanings, based on audience instinct and “stored experience.” Van Ghent also discusses the manner by which Bunyan shapes characters, his clear and unadorned language allowing him to create a tone that immediately identifies character types; they divulge their own personalities through syntax and idiom. For instance, Obstinate’s series of exclamatories, complete with exclamation marks, helps readers perceive him as rushing toward opinions without thinking about his statements.
To be sure, The Pilgrim’s Progress contains passages of debate about doctrine that may dull a modern reader’s senses, and Bunyan’s didactic intentions are never deep beneath the surface of his tale, told in sometimes jarring episodes rather than as a smooth, uninterrupted plot. However, literary critics agree that its unrivaled popularity had much more to do with its entertainment value than its moral guidance. It would advance the development of the novel and have an enduring effect on later fiction, as evidenced by William Makepeace Thackeray’s reference to it in the title of his own popular work Vanity Fair (1848).
Bibliography
Batson, E. Beatrice. John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress: An Overview of Literary Studies, 1960–1987. New York: Garland, 1988.
Mullett, Michael A. John Bunyan in Context. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1997.
Van Ghent, Dorothy. The English Novel: Form and Function. New York: Harper and Row, 1959.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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