SOURCE: Swaim, Kathleen M. “The Allegorical Way.” In Pilgrim's Progress, Puritan Progress: Discourses and Contexts, pp. 18-41. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Swaim examines aspects of allegory and how Bunyan uses the genre for his purpose in Pilgrim's Progress.]

Bunyan so intensely presents the Christian life, so urgently wishes to communicate actuality to the reader, is such a psychological realist and didactic in so evangelical a fashion, that the convention of mediaeval allegory is given new shape and new pressure, losing its point by point applicability, shifting rapidly, passing from figurative representation to actuality and back again as easily as scripture does and making each episode mean the whole. There are incongruities but there is complete unity of theme, intention, plot, characters, ornaments, illustrations, biblical references, and allegory. Every character may be the reader.

—Roy Daniells, Milton, Mannerism and Baroque

Difficult to categorize, Pilgrim's Progress has been much praised for its form, much honored for its content. It has been labeled a child's story, a dream vision, a picaresque novel, a social document, and a Puritan treatise. Generically, it is sometimes claimed for the epic, sometimes for the novel; sometimes praised for its fantasy, sometimes for its realism. Roger Sharrock has called it “a literary hybrid” compounded of “the forms and language of religious allegory, the early novel, popular sermons and moral dialogue, romance and folk story,” and similarly ten years later “this mixture of Calvinist theology, folk-tale reminiscence, personal psychology and realistic thumbnail sketches.”¹

From such a range of descriptors, reflecting the varied needs this narrative has answered through several centuries, I wish to explore two literary categories that articulate not so much the story's form as its process and power. Thus, allegory will focus a review of some basic narrative evidence in this chapter, as myth will govern the argument in the next. Analysis of Pilgrim's Progress properly begins by deconstructing the dominant similitude of pilgrimage and setting forth the issues relating to the Way, the travelers, and “progress,” or in literary terms the setting and context, the hero and character interactions, and the plot and narrative structure. This chapter applies theoretical definitions of allegory and the allegorical transaction to evidence of setting, character, and horizontal narrative “progress” (or lack of it) in Pilgrim's Progress. Given Bunyan's materials and purposes, literary considerations cannot exclude the theological even when, as here, the intention is chiefly secular. The Puritan context makes all such categories problematic, and thus rewarding in unexpected ways.

From its title-page invocation of Hosea 12.10, “I have used Similitudes,” Bunyan's pilgrimage is constantly overlaid with equations of narrative data and Protestant thematics; in other words, it is an allegory. Few discussions of Pilgrim's Progress avoid its allegorical foundations, as few discussions of allegory can ignore the sometimes inconvenient evidence of this work. Allegory means literally “other-speaking,” or saying one thing and meaning both the thing said and also something else. In Coleridge's famous formulation, allegoric writing employs “one set of agents and images with actions and accompaniments correspondent, so as to convey, while in disguise, either moral qualities or conceptions of the mind that are not in themselves objects of the senses, or other images, agents, actions, fortunes, and circumstances, so that the difference is everywhere presented to the eye or imagination while the likeness is suggested to the mind; and this connectedly so that the parts combine to form a consistent whole.” For Coleridge elsewhere, allegory manifests “mechanic” rather than “organic” form.²

The narrative allegorist fleshes out a dominating idea by creating a complex imaginative system, field, or environment of correspondence between the ideational and the concrete in what handbooks call an “extended metaphor” or “continuous similitude,” Spenser's “dark conceit” and “pleasing analysis.” The allegorical system contains flexibly linked narrative clusters or subsystems of evidence, themselves made up of varied tropes, especially personifications, equations of person and place, and externalizations of inward traits of character. Gay Clifford outlines allegory's analytic procedures as “separating out various aspects of a concept or process into a multiplicity of persons or personifications … [and] placing related notions in sets or categories or in more or less self-contained dramatic units … [and] us[ing] visual detail and thematic and symbolic images.” For Clifford, allegory is a kinetic combination of the familiar and the elusive communicating urgency and mystery (94, 12, 2). One of the greatest literary allegorists, Dante Alighieri, specifies his method as “poetic, fictive, descriptive, digressive, and transumptive, and it as well consists in definition, division, proof, refutation, and the giving of examples” (100).

Allegory handles its narrative data and its controlled environment in distinctive ways. As a linguistic procedure of encoded and reciprocating speech, allegory appeals, says Maureen Quilligan, “to readers as readers of a system of signs” (24). Angus Fletcher's booklength analysis equates allegory with “symbolic power struggles” and specifies its symbolic mode as ornamental, obsessive, hierarchic, didactic, and paratactic, a matter of daemonic agents, cosmic imagery, symbolic acts and rituals, and thematic ambivalence. Fletcher explains the environment thus: “The typical personified agent can ‘act’ only in consort with other similar agents, a combination which limits each work to a given problem or set of problems. The highly controlled interaction of ideas requires a corresponding definition of the limits of each.” Allegory is, for Fletcher, “the manipulation of a texture of ‘ornaments’ so as to engage the reader in an interpretive activity,” a technique fostered by Christianity which “sees the creation of the world as an establishment of a universal symbolic vocabulary.” Its “openness of purpose” is in tension with “an opposite encapsulating tendency”; it simultaneously simplifies and complicates, clarifies and deliberately obscures. Allegories translate culturally viable moral assumptions into metaphor, and are thus both monuments to ideals and ideological instruments, agencies of power and propaganda, vehicles for expressing (and sometimes critiquing) traditional ideas.³

For the most part the narrative evidence of Pilgrim's Progress part I to be considered in the present chapter operates out of such basic understandings of the nature of allegory, but because later chapters on the written and expressive Word and on the self employ allegory's richer operations it is appropriate to lay some foundations for later, more complex inquiry. Thus allegory is a matter of both form and content; it is both a product and a process, both a mode of expression (Lewis, Allegory 48) and a mode of thought (MacCaffrey 25-26). Edward A. Bloom captures much of the nature of allegory within the metaphors of lamination and foliation (173). Allegory is, then, both a homogeneous construct made up of multiple, parallel, superposed, and bonded layers, and also a system of lateral outgrowths of branches, stems, and leaves, literally a “ramification.” The layered model recognizes allegory not just as a form but also as a complexly interactive process involving text, the author's purposes and context, and the reader's participation. Allegory thus viewed can be highly convoluted and self-reflexive, centripetal rather than centrifugal.

Since allegory produces literary works dominated (some would say overwhelmed) by themes, it participates in a very special transaction with its readers. By attaching ideas systematically to a literary structure, allegory “releases a counterplay of imagination and thought by which each becomes an irritant to the other, and both may grow through the irksome contact” (Edgar Wind quoted in MacCaffrey 51). Speaking particularly of Bunyan's practice, Brian Nellist calls allegory a trap whose customary privilege is to present selective obsessions as if they were universal laws (139). Out of a dialectic between the literal and the metaphorical, the analytic reader of allegory produces meaning. To some extent, all literary commentary is allegorical interpretation, but in formal allegory the author deliberately creates structures that guide, even dictate how interpretation of a particular work must proceed. Commenting on the invitational component in allegory, Fletcher says: “The silences in allegory mean as much as the filled-in spaces, because by bridging the silent gaps between oddly unrelated images we reach the sunken understructure of thought” (107). Allegory is both the creation and interpretation of ambiguous or polysemous signs that instruct in what to believe (quid credas) and how to act (quid agas). Allegory is also didactic (quo tendas); it projects an ideal, a worthy goal of vitalization and/or renewal.

The reciprocating nature of allegorical data helps break down our understanding of objects and meaning so that allegory's “dark conceit” can initiate a process of gradual enlightenment and progressive self-discovery. Gregory the Great's definition of allegory, enfolded within a discussion of the Song of Solomon, contextualizes the aspirational process:

Allegory serves as a kind of machine to the spirit by means of which it may be raised up to God. Thus when enigmas are set before a man and he recognizes certain things in the words which are familiar to him, he may understand in the sense of the words what is not familiar to him; and by means of earthly words he is separated from the earth. Since he does not abhor what he knows, he may come to understand what he does not know. For the things which are known to us from which allegory is made are clothed in divine doctrine, and when we recognize the thing by an exterior word, we may come to an interior understanding.

(quoted in Robertson 57-58)

As an analytic mode well adapted to deal with our epistemological dilemma, allegory imitates “the process whereby we analyze, categorize, and give names to the opaque realities, both ‘external’ and ‘internal,’ of experience” (MacCaffrey 37, 39). The chief characters in an allegory, themselves enacting truth-seeking, are thus exemplary and didactic for the reader. Allegories are also often attended by instructional and interpretational apparatus—Dante's letter to Can Grande, Spenser's letter to Raleigh, Bunyan's verse “Apology” and marginal glosses—so that both the explication and the reader's self-consciousness reenact the allegorical content.

An allegory is thus a complex linguistic and epistemological adventure, a matter at once of self-consciousness and heightened consciousness, proceeding from exterior signs to interior illumination. In the most recent comprehensive commentary, Maureen Quilligan calls the allegorical mode “the most self-reflexive and critically self-conscious of narrative genres” whose purpose is to make readers correspondingly self-conscious and to teach us “what kind of readers we are, and what kind we must become in order to interpret our significance in the cosmos” (24). Allegorical narratives or “self-reflexive fictions” read the reader as well as vice versa in a process Quilligan calls “collusion,” for they require the reader's active participation in order to be perfected, and that perfection will occur primarily in realms outside the fictional environment (226). In a context of the priesthood of all believers, such reading has a marked hieratic function.

Allegory's convolutions of consciousness multiply because the allegorical transaction not only contains whole series of such attachments to data but because allegories are characteristically referenced to texts outside themselves; they offer “a twice-told tale” (Honig 12). Allegory regularly “echoes” (Fletcher's word) a specific, sometimes specified, precedent cultural pattern or written text outside itself, what Quilligan labels the pretext (also a pretext). The gulf between text and pre-text forces readers of allegory to reflection, re-collection, and discovery of the prior truths that lie concealed behind or beneath the textual surface. Prior, as we shall see, has some very special meanings for the reading action of Pilgrim's Progress part I, for that narrative depends heavily, as did Puritanism generally, upon a priori truth and texts. The original and authorizing pre-text of all Christian allegory is of course the Bible, functioning not as a source of ideas so much as a source of power, authority, and the truth the allegorist reinvigorates. Indeed many writers of prophetic allegory so far privilege the Bible as to threaten the autonomy of their narratives (Quilligan 122).

Through its various codes and structures, allegory blends text and commentary and guides reader interactions with both the largest and smallest units of evidence. Both inside and outside the narration, Pilgrim's Progress regularly references the Bible for individual words but also as its controlling authority. The chief biblical authorization of allegorical transactions between reader and text, the distinction in 2 Corinthians 3.6 between the letter that killeth and the spirit that giveth life, is itself highly self-conscious. Even in the biblical context, St. Paul equates believers with texts to be read: “Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart” (3.3). For Paul interpretive sufficiency derives not from the reader but from God (3.5), and what the reader reads is himself and God in himself. In Puritan thinking, the experience of conversion capacitates such reading skill. Such convoluted reflexivity can create a reading experience rather like tracing a Möbius strip with its improbable progression along planes of thought and imagery that fold back upon themselves endlessly.

Because allegory is simultaneously a creative and an interpretive procedure, because it is at root a quest for intellectual enlightenment as well as spiritual growth, in important ways all allegorical writings may be said to take their readers on journeys. The metaphor applies to Pilgrim's Progress with special force, however, for Bunyan launched his enterprise with the hope that “This Book will make a Traveller of thee” (6). As its brief title indicates, it concerns itself with both forward movement—that is “progress”—and with “pilgrimage”—that is movement toward a holy site. At the literal or narrative level Pilgrim's Progress variously develops the evidence of traveling, travelers, and the road, and the remainder of this chapter reviews that dominating similitude with an eye to allegorical forms and transactions.

Edwin Honig has proposed two possible re-creative relations between the Bible and an allegory: “prophetic” and “apocalyptic.” The former looks backward to reinforce the Bible and the Law, while the latter offers more personal, more forward-looking and mysterious vision; the former attaches to history, the latter to poetry; the former describes such allegory as Bunyan's, the latter those of Dante and Spenser (107-8). The prophetic mode dominates Pilgrim's Progress, and much of the basic and least self-conscious textual evidence supports this assignment. The “Kings Highway” to the Celestial City on which Christian travels “was cast up by the Patriarchs, Prophets, Christ, and his Apostles, and it is as straight as a Rule can make it” (59, 27). The ultimate goal of Christian's pilgrimage is “an Inheritance, incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away; and it is laid up in Heaven, and fast there, to be bestowed at the time appointed, on them that diligently seek it” (11, quoting 1 Peter 1.4). The goal is variously identified as Mount Sion or Zion, the heavenly Country or the heavenly Jerusalem, the Celestial Gate or Celestial City, the Paradise of God. The starting point and destination of the journey and the role of the traveler as stranger and pilgrim, moving from rejected to idealized sites, are essentially founded upon Hebrews 11.13-16:

[The cloud of patriarchal witnesses] all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a Country. And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.

At Vanity Fair Christian and Faithful identify themselves as “Pilgrims and Strangers in the world [who are] going to their own Countrey” (90, and see Saints' Privilege and Profit, Offor 1:681).

Allegories characteristically begin with a striking representation of their narrative world, with a particularized spiritual and psychic environment, a comprehensive problem to be addressed, and an implicit goal to be striven for. Early static emblems and symbolic acts give way to later, more dynamic fictional, thematic, and interpretational interactions. At the outset Pilgrim's Progress's isolated and desperate hero reading in his book quickly enacts the governing question of the fiction, What must I do to be saved? That question shapes an answer implying the journey ahead and its ultimate goal and rationale. To be saved, Christian must travel from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, a matter of travel and reading, of outward and inward “progress,” a process collapsing the spatial into the nonspatial.

The allegorical purpose thus launched in Pilgrim's Progress is in many ways characteristic of the genre. Its settings, characters, and actions realistically and even charmingly image familiar physical, psychological, and social experience and often achieve the evocative power of a symbolic and suprarational overlay of the familiar. The varied and flexible environment is engagingly and copiously detailed. As is characteristic of allegory, the sites are occasionally and paratactically rather than causally sequenced, challenging the reader to seek an underlying logic or controlling order. Whether we find or create such an order or fall back upon the Puritan expectation of an arbitrary world and a mysterious divine purpose, a large proportion of the reader's processing of this text depends upon an increasingly confident sense of the Way, as traveler after traveler adds a new layer of fresh coloration upon the basic grids.

Cumulative reinforcement or incrementation is characteristic of allegory—also of course the principal given of the narrative of part II—and sometimes topography is personified into threats, visions, or voices. Sites regularly function as externalizations or projections of the hero's psychic nature or present circumstances. In an often-remarked narrative feature, the geography in Pilgrim's Progress varies with the spiritual condition of those who encounter it. It is also true that an apparently supportive site, such as the arbor on Hill Difficulty, can surprise the reader and the hero by harboring unsuspected kinds of danger. As By-path Meadow literalizes “trespass” so the Delectable Mountains literalize “pastoral,” two samples of the plays on words so typical of allegory's awakening or reorganizing of the reader's epistemology.

The characteristically discontinuous nature of allegorical imagery sustains its illustrative purposes. The sites of Christian's journey are for the most part notably discrete units, what unity there is deriving from what U. Milo Kaufmann identifies as the historically refined wholeness of consensus Puritan religious experience (Pilgrim's Progress 114). Only rarely is a new allegorical setting dictated by its predecessor, nor does a thorough-going step-by-step progression of the topographical, physical, psychological, or spiritual emerge. Data are in marked isolation from each other, and Fletcher speaks of the objects within an allegorical world as “all lined up, as it were, on the frontal plane of a mosaic, each with its own ‘true,’ unchanging size and shape” (87, 104-5). Such discontinuity applies to the allegorical population as well as to setting, and Fletcher notes the characteristically “segmented” nature of the allegorical hero's life (35).

Allegories normatively feature reciprocity of persons and places. The details of place externalize character traits, while the actions of characters put abstract concepts into motion and into relationships. The characters Christian encounters, like the places he visits, map the allegorical environment of Pilgrim's Progress part I and test the hero's strength, perception, and faith. Some characters interact directly and intensely with Christian; others extend his character traits or project his options from a greater distance; still others attach to his story only tangentially. Such widening circles highlight both the central figure and the complexity of the narrative world. Allegories regularly proceed by generating multiples, “secondary personalities,” or “chips of composite character,” and these fractionated extensions of the main character interact with the hero in what Fletcher describes as a “syllogistic” manner. They also multiply the symmetries of plot (35, 38, 195).

The usual base of symmetry in Pilgrim's Progress is the pathway along which travel and plot occur. When characters project the hero's choices they occur in multiples of course, but it is a point of some interest, especially by contrast with the general conversation in part II, that Christian seriously converses almost exclusively with only one other person at a time. The sisters at House Beautiful, for example, speak only serially, and late in the story, Christian drops back so that Ignorance and Faithful may interact only with each other. Christian's social development may be seen in a “progress” from monologue to dialogue, and these categories of discourse translate into a progress from Puritan self-involvements to Puritan godly conversations, from a conversion crisis to witnessing and works.

The principal characters in allegories are often devices for including the reader—an Everyman or a Christian—or containing arenas for psychic display—Red Cross Knight or again Christian. Within the terrain of both the universal and the particular inhabited by allegorical characters, names signal meaning, sometimes subtly, sometimes not. A series of Christian's fellow pilgrims receive full characterization, including humanizing as well as idealizing features, but a great number function merely as reflections of their names, as “real persons with nicknames,” according to Coleridge (Coleridge 475). Quilligan has remarked of personification allegory generally that it reifies language, that by animating nouns, it subjects their concepts to close, sometimes etymological scrutiny (115-16). Specifically in Pilgrim's Progress part I, names tend to be adjectival, not nominal, to exemplify rather than incarnate qualities (Quilligan 128), or in Kaufmann's distinction they hint at attribute rather than essence (Pilgrim's Progress 90). Wolfgang Iser proposes, especially in relation to Faithful and Hopeful, that “the numinous is allegorized by nouns when it is concerned with the human soul; the self is allegorized by adjectives when the only impulsion is a longing for the transcendental world beyond” (17).

The population of Vanity Fair miniaturizes Bunyan's allegorical technique, arraying the details of failed community in the figures of Hate-good, Envy, Superstition, Pickthank, Old Man, Carnal Delight, Luxurious, Desire of Vain-glory, Lechery, Having Greedy, Blind-man, No-good, Malice, Love-lust, Live-loose, Heady, High-mind, Enmity, Lyar, Cruelty, Hate-light, and Implacable. These figures are, in Vincent Newey's phrase, “presences in a phantasmagoric festival of malice” (“Bunyan” 29). A smaller similarly satiric list is invoked with Byends's former schoolfellows (101). Deft portraits capture individuals within a single word, behavior, speech, or personality trait rather than by invocations of traditional visual iconography or expansive physical detail. It is an art that Rosemary Freeman traces to the emblem tradition on the basis of the characters' singularity, centripetal energy, and stasis (225). Interestingly, these radically concise externalizations of personal natures are aural rather than visual. Vanity Fair is Bunyan's only detailed depiction of a site more inclusive than a single dwelling or single topographical feature, and the larger scale invites painting with a more satirical and comprehensive brush. The combination of rabble, hubbub, judicial proceedings, biblical base, and a cataloguing style and glancing wit make Vanity Fair one of the great set pieces of Pilgrim's Progress part I and indeed of English literature. Stylistic distancing sets the episode off from the text, the more so as Christian shows no residual effects of his experiences here.

Christian's encounters with others normally occur not as psychomachy or debate but in linear sequence in an attraction-repulsion model. Allegorical characters and settings are morally valenced or in Fletcher's suggestive word “daemonized,” that is, acting out, or acting out of, a particular moral energy or compartmentalized function: when “a man is possessed by an influence that excludes all other influences while it is operating on him” and thereby he “has no life outside [its] exclusive sphere of action” (47, 40, 49). As is usual in allegory, the dramatis personae divide into representations of either vice or virtue, seventy-three evil and seventeen virtuous ones by Monica Furlong's count.⁴ Bunyan also groups characters according to their relations to the Way and the traveling process.

The virtuous characters fall into two distinct categories, three if we include the several Shining Ones or angels as a separate group. In the first half of the story, older advisors and instructors—Evangelist, Help, the gatekeepers, and Interpreter—demarcate psychic stages of the journey, impel the traveler forward, and perform “ministerial” and “congregational” functions. At House Beautiful, the questioners Discretion, Prudence, Piety, and Charity—the only female characters with whom Christian directly interacts—signal the community and catechism of a church. The shepherds, Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere, both literally and liturgically, fulfill a “pastoral” role.

The majority of the second half of the narrative consists of “godly conversation.” The visual, topographical, externally active, and descriptive data that dominated the first half drop away in favor of edifying dialogue, sometimes between two visible saints, sometimes between a saint and a false professor. The most important other saints are Faithful, a chronological peer, and the younger Hopeful. We expect Bunyan's Christian hero to interact importantly with the traditional Christian virtues, but we might not expect that he would give as well as receive the strengths these characters embody. We also might not expect a humanizing, even comedic dimension to relationships among such sober concepts, but when Faithful refuses to tarry, Christian rushes to catch up: “Putting to all his strength, he quickly got up with Faithful, and did also over-run him, so the last was first. Then did Christian vain-gloriously smile, because he had gotten the start of his Brother: but not taking good heed to his feet, he suddenly stumbled and fell, and could not rise again, until Faithful came up to help him” (66). Readers easily gloss the charming moment as “Pride goeth before a fall.” Christian's later condescending, rather grumpy correction of Hopeful again strikes a comedic note (127). Together Christian and Faithful and later Christian and Hopeful sort through the claims of a series of false professors, refining individual points of belief, knowledge, motive, and expectation.

Where we expect Christian to become increasingly like such allegorical companions, Bunyan highlights differences. Both Faithful and Christian began as citizens of the City of Destruction, but they have been differently challenged by the same terrain. Dorothy Van Ghent describes Faithful as an unburdened man without “shadows,” with “little imagination and a relatively meager sensibility,” who throws Christian “into relief as a man who has suffered and been afraid and wallowed in mud, a man of complex and difficult temperament, vainglorious at times in his strength, at other times doubtful or despairing.”⁵ Faithful's history is ontological rather than teleological; it reflects the past, essential natures, and the foundations of action. Evangelist's prophetic reappearance confirms Christian's fully achieved Faith. The happy transcendence of Faithful's martyrdom generates Hopeful, the second of the three Christian virtues, as Christian's companion in his stead and redirects the hero's experience toward future action and ultimate ends. “Thus one died to make Testimony to the Truth, and another rises out of his Ashes to be a Companion with Christian” (98). Bunyan's commentary on Genesis remarks how, similarly, Seth takes the place of the murdered Abel and Peter the place of James (Offor II:453-54). Christian's interactions with Hopeful, “his own better self” (Newey, “Bunyan” 28, 23), are marked by experience rather than hearing, patience rather than external enemies, anticipations of heavenly reward rather than justification or doctrine or the Bible.

Faithful and Hopeful allegorize the substance of Bunyan's treatise on Ps. 130.7, Israel's Hope Encouraged; or, What Hope Is, and How Distinguished from Faith: With Encouragements for a Hoping People, and its major arguments directly illuminate the evolution of Faith[ful] into Hope[ful] in Christian's experience in Pilgrim's Progress. In essence, for Bunyan Hope is born of Faith, and though secondary can do what Faith cannot:

Faith comes by hearing … hope by experience. … Faith comes by hearing the Word of God, hope by the credit that faith hath given to it. … Faith believeth the truth of the Word, hope waits for the fulfilling of it. … Faith lays hold of that end of the promise that is next to us, to wit, as it is in the Bible; hope lays hold of that end of the promise that is fastened to the mercy-seat. … Faith looketh to Christ, as dead, buried, and ascended; and hope to his second coming. … Faith looks to him for justification, hope for glory. … Faith fights for doctrine, hope for a reward. … Faith for what is in the Bible, hope for what is in heaven. … Faith purifies the heart from bad principles. … Hope from bad manners. … Faith sets hope on work, hope sets patience on work. … Faith looks through the word to God in Christ; hope looks through faith beyond the world to glory. … Faith saves by laying hold of God by Christ. … Hope saves by prevailing with the soul to suffer all troubles, afflictions, and adversities that it meets with betwixt this and the world to come, for the sake thereof. … It is hope that makes the soul exercise patience and long-suffering under the cross, until the time comes to enjoy the crown.

(Offor I:578)

This treatise glosses Hopeful and Christian's successes against despair at both Doubting Castle and the River of Death, and of course Bunyan's own decades of struggle recorded in Grace Abounding. Despair is the sense of God's desertion and of the self as incapable and unworthy; it is the failure of hope for future betterment, felt as irreversible stasis and incapacitating confinement within present circumstances, the inability to move not only forward but in any direction. Israel's Hope Encouraged provides this definition: “For what is the ground of despair, but a conceit that sin has shut the soul out of all interest in happiness? and what is the reason of that, but a persuasion that there is no help for him in God?” (Offor I:593). Good News For the Vilest of Men describes despair as the devil's chains, as a contradictor of Christ, as undervaluing the Promises, and as making man God's judge: “It drives a man to the study of his own ruine, and brings him at last to be his own executioner” (XI:65, 66).

Pilgrim's Progress part I variously “realizes” the motifs of despair in the Man in the Iron Cage at Interpreter's house with his deep sadness, downcast eyes, heart-breaking sighs, and hardened heart. God, he claims, by denying him repentance, has locked him in an iron cage. His testimony shows that the condition is one chiefly brought upon himself (35, similarly Grace Abounding 49). When we first meet Bunyan's hero, originally named “Graceless” (46), he is in a “desperate” stasis in the City of Destruction. The early Slough of Despond and the late dungeon of Doubting Castle compound personal helplessness and psychic confinement. The Giant Despair, after sound cudgelings, pressures his victims to commit suicide. As seen from the vantage of Mount Caution, Despair usually leaves his victims blind and wandering among tombs.

In such settings Bunyan's Hopeful indeed proves to be what Israel's Hope Encouraged analyzes as a soul-encouraging grace, a soul-emboldening grace, and a soul-preserving grace. The treatise presents hope as turning the mind away from difficulties and toward faith and patience and lists the ways to exercise hope as: to look well to your faith, not to stumble or doubt at the sight of your own weakness, to call to mind what God has done for you in earlier times, and to look to the end of this and the beginning of the next world (Offor I:582-83). Even as late as the crossing of the River of Death, Hopeful helps Christian master the sense of unworthiness that temporarily overwhelms him and enact the advisories of Israel's Hope Encouraged: “Hope is the grace that relieveth the soul when dark and weary. Hope is as the bottle to the faint and sinking spirit. Hope calls upon the soul not to forget how far it is arrived in its progress towards heaven. Hope will point and show it the gate afar off; and therefore it is called the hope of salvation. Hope exerciseth itself upon God” (590). The references here to progress, to heaven, and to distant gates sharpen to a fine point the parallels between treatise and allegorical pilgrimage.

Christian's responses to the linked despair occasions in Pilgrim's Progress trace a somewhat different line. Doubt, we may note, is a process of perception, despair a product. The doubt of Doubting Castle for him marks an expected stage in the Puritan sequence of conversion and salvation, but the site's agent Despair achieves only a limited control over him. The psychodrama here empowers Christian to rely upon his own resources. The presence of Hopeful and the key of promise in Christian's bosom help him process spiritual threats into spiritual victories by means that are at once logical and theological. Because Christian remains subject to despair even in the River of Death, some commentators deplore his lack of “progress,” but in fact these late occasions, though intense in their terrors, serve to vitalize and magnify, to “illustrate,” faith against enormous odds and thus demonstrate not only spiritual achievement appropriate to a moment of challenge but also spiritual endurance, not only a qualitative or subjective progress but also a quantitative or temporally linear one.

Whereas Christian's positive encounters comfort, instruct, or accompany him upon the Way, his negative encounters, such as these with forms of Despair, also fall into distinguishable groups and patterned relations to the travel similitude. The stasis of nonhuman or superhuman enemy figures, such as Apollyon, Despair, Demas, and Pope, essentially represents the nature of evil by contrast with Christian's varied “progress.”⁶

With the exception of the citizens of Vanity Fair, the negatively valenced human figures in part I are ordinarily entering or traveling either forward or backward along the Way. Character groupings in the first half illustrate the characteristic feature of allegory in which, as Roger Sharrock phrases it, particular traits of the soul are drained away from the hero and projected onto personified temptations and incentives (John Bunyan [1966] 54). In the second half, they crowd the Way as what Bunyan here and elsewhere calls “false professors.” Pairs or triads of peer figures make character traits and choices situational, the options screening the hero's mind and marking progress or decision points. Christian's early psychic conflict, projected onto Obstinate and Pliable, illustrates this allegorical operation. The former shows us a newly converted Christian who might have been “obstinate” in his despairing residence in the City of Destruction or in the way he would allow himself to be saved. The character's rigid insistence upon his own will signals stasis. Pliable is only ostensibly less stubborn about having his own “Way.” So long as it is easy to move he will keep company, but his character cannot sustain any real challenges to the status quo or consent to the loss of selfhood Christianity requires.

Several later sets of interlocking characters of this sort situationalize allegory more complexly. After leaving his burden at the sepulcher, Christian comes upon the options of Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, who do not now threaten him, but immediately thereafter he is fully engaged by Formalist and Hypocrisy. The first three represent what may happen to the new convert after the moment of spiritual triumph fades; the second pair, who have tumbled over a wall into the Way, signal a bypassing of the conversion experience of changed selfhood: “And besides, said they, so be we get into the way, what's matter which way we get in? if we are in, we are in: thou art but in the way, who, as we perceive, came in at the Gate; and we are also in the way that came tumbling over the wall: Wherein now is thy condition better than ours?” (40). We shall return in a moment to the slippery word Way. Here the “simplified” and “slothful” “presumption” that recurs in Formalist and Hypocrisy allows Christian an opportunity to distinguish between his disciplined spiritual service and their self-indulgent fancy, between his covenant of grace and theirs of works (here keeping the “Laws and Ordinances” [40-41]). Like Pliable they have no capacity to sustain challenges. They chiefly provide Christian with an opportunity to affirm, in the words of Ephesians 1.13, that he is one who has been “sealed with the holy Spirit of promise.”

The allegory compounds, however, when Formalist and Hypocrisy pass to the left (Danger) and to the right (Destruction), while Christian climbs up the narrow Way of Hill Difficulty. To refresh himself against increasing “difficulties” during the climb, Christian pauses but falls asleep, a sleep that loses him his roll and requires that he retrace his steps thrice over.⁷ This sleep reactivates and internalizes the condition of Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, and with Christian this time indeed subject to their force as he earlier was not. Moments later Timorous and Mistrust tell Christian that they turned around when they “had got up that difficult place” (43; Bunyan's italics). These two represent not just alternate responses to a particular Hill but also aspects of himself, literally “reflections,” that Christian overcomes easily within the narrative, but can overcome thematically only with greater effort. The discourse with them obliges him to remember, return for, and thereby reempower his lost roll of promises. These “reflections” of Christian's character oblige him to psychic “reflection” which he translates into action by traveling backward on the Way.

The word reflection expresses what Quilligan defines as central to the genre, that is “the generation of narrative structure out of wordplay” (22). “Reflection” signals both layered interactions of character and layered meanings of physical and psychic action. Another differently layered, generating word for Pilgrim's Progress part I is Way, whose compound meanings in both text and pre-text richly vary the narrative's radical travel metaphor. At the narrative level, Pilgrim's Progress calls frequent attention to the primary setting, the pathway upon which the hero and others travel, but even in its simplest usage Way often glances at the pre-text of Matthew 7.13-14, the straight and narrow Way that leads to life by contrast with the wide and broad Way that leads to destruction. At first Christian does not know how to put himself in the Way: “Yet he stood still, because, as I perceived, he could not tell which way to go” (9 and similarly 10). Later and more normatively, his “narrow way lay right up the Hill” (41). Upon occasion, Pilgrim's Progress lingers over the authorizing text, Matthew 7.13-14, for example, when Christian parts from Formalist and Hypocrisy to follow the path that is “steep and high,” whereas they choose the easier byways called “Danger” and “Destruction” (42). Christian's pathway through part of the Valley of the Shadow of Death is exceedingly narrow between a deep ditch on one side and a dangerous quagmire on the other. The Way is also “here so dark, that oft times when he lift up his foot to set forward, he knew not where, or upon what he should set it next” (62).

The narrative often interweaves realistic detail with other authorizing texts to generate variously polysemous meanings of this key word. At Bypath Meadow we are told that Christian and Hopeful “durst not go out of the way” and that “The soul of the Pilgrims was much discouraged, because of the way” and that “still as they went on, they wished for better way” (111, quoting Numbers 21.4). One must go “out of the World” to go “out of the Way” in avoiding Vanity Fair (89). As a “Caution” to pilgrims, however, Lot's wife errs even though she never steps out of the Way (109). A mysterious voice cites Jeremiah 31.20 to guide Christian and Hopeful: “Let thine Heart be towards the High-way, even the way that thou wentest, turn again” (113), and the shepherds attach Proverbs 21.16 to the occasion of Despair and Doubting Castle: “He that wandereth out of the way of understanding, shall remain in the Congregation of the dead” (121). In general, we may say, again with the shepherds, the Way is “Safe for those for whom it is to be safe, but transgressors shall fall therein” (119, quoting Hosea 14.9).

The Way is a linear set of topographical features by or through which a traveler passes. The usual understanding of “progress” in Bunyan's narrative assumes a direct correlation between physical and spiritual place, which measures pilgrimage by relative positionings upon the graduated scale of a linear and shared Way, what Christian means when he says he walks “by the Rule of my Master” (40). Stanley Fish analyzes traveling of this sort in Pilgrim's Progress to include: “(1) the negotiation by one or more pilgrims of a fixed and graduated set of obstacles (2) a direct and progressive relationship between the number of obstacles negotiated and the piling up of spiritual ‘points’ toward a definite goal (3) a growing sense of accomplishment and self-satisfaction (in the reader as well as in the characters) which accelerates as the pilgrims draw nearer to the Heavenly City” (Self-Consuming Artifacts 228, 231, 229). It is difficult to isolate, even temporarily, the physical Way from its spiritual coordinate, for reasons that Bunyan's The Holy City explains: “It is usual in the holy Scripture to call the transformation of the sinner from Satan to God, a holy way, and also to admonish him that is so transformed to walk in that way, saying, Walk in the Faith, Love, Spirit, and newness of Life, and walk in the Truth, Wayes, Statutes and Judgments of God” (III:151). This work also calls the street of the New Jerusalem “the way of Holiness, even the way in which men learn to fear God, and to believe in, and love the Lord Jesus” (III:151).

The linear Way is thus also a complex, biblically endorsed metaphor for the spiritual journey, the traveler, and the process or even style of the traveling. In distinguishing between two meanings of Way as “the outward profession of Christianity” and as “the inward and spiritual grace,” Coleridge took occasion to complain of Bunyan's “degeneration” into a pun (Coleridge 479). Similarly, but without complaint, Philip Edwards identifies three ideas of the journey as “(a) the vicissitudes of a Christian's life, arising from external threat and inner disturbance, (b) obeying the strict demands of the true faith, and (c) advancing in the understanding and practice of the Christian life.” Within the qualification that keeping to the path means keeping to the whole path, Edwards generalizes: “Christian's journey charts the progressive attainment of spiritual understanding and proficiency and the never-lessening danger of losing one's way, or one's determination, right up to the last mile” (115, 116). In such usage, Way equates with end, an ambiguous term evoking traditional logic's distinction between “the end of which” and “the end for which,” that is, between terminus and informing purpose or perfection. Puritans defined themselves as Wayfarers, and Bunyan's Way is at once the universal life-journey and the journey of Christian commitment; it is “the path of all Christians through the wilderness of the world … and simultaneously the inner way of faith of the individual believer.”⁸

The Way, so often acknowledged within the narrative, is at once the figure, example, and mediation of Christ and also the mode of procedure appropriate to his followers and imitators. As such it is governed primarily by John 14.6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me,” a text buttressed by such Pauline passages as Romans 4.12 advising that the Christian “walk in the steps of that faith of our father Abraham,” and 2 Corinthians 5.7 observing that “we walk by faith, not by sight.” Bunyan cites Job 14.6 and Matthew 7.14 to describe Christ as “the way to God the Father” in Grace Abounding (20, and see Christian Behaviour III:13). Fish enfolds an inclusive range of meanings of “Way” in a formulation at once crisp and suggestive: “Being in the way, then, is paradoxically independent of the way you happen to be in, for you will be in the way only if the way is in you” (Self-Consuming Artifacts 228).

Christians are advised not just to honor the Way but to walk in it. The minutes of Bunyan's Bedford congregation regularly use the phrase walking with us as synonymous with church membership. Walking here also means conduct, in individual incidents and also as a general practice. At its simplest, travel or progress upon the Way means: forward movement in space; continuous improvement; and “going on to a further or higher stage, or to further or higher stages successively” (OED 4b). As the narrative unfolds, the first of these senses of progress as journey gives way to the more modern sense of progress as improvement or movement toward (Keeble, Literary Culture 278). For Bunyan and his contemporaries more than for us, “progress” included a political dimension (or the Puritan translation of such politics within the context of the late seventeenth century) and meant a state journey or official visitation or circuit made by royal, noble, or church personages or other public figures (OED 2a).

From the earliest literary records, travel has served as an organizing principle of narrative as well as a metaphor for growth. Like many authors, Bunyan exploits it for allegorical and nonallegorical purposes. His treatise The Heavenly Footman particularly develops the simple metaphor nonallegorically to teach readers exactly how to travel. It glosses both the similitude and the text of Pilgrim's Progress. At its simplest, footman means someone traveling on foot, but footman is also a lowly military status, and it is in this sense that Christian contrasts himself and Hopeful with the gloriously armored King's Champion (131). Of course, England's recent history included spiritually minded soldiers on very real battlefields.⁹

Prefatory verses explain that Pilgrim's Progress came upon Bunyan unawares when he had almost finished writing a different work, by general agreement The Heavenly Footman,¹⁰ whose subtitle might serve as subtitle for Pilgrim's Progress as well: A Description of The Man that gets to Heaven. Together, With the Way he Runs in, the Marks he Goes by: Also some Directions, how to Run, so as to Obtain. The verses develop the allegorical principles of both projects:

This Book it chaulketh out before thine eyes,
The man that seeks the everlasting Prize:
It shews you whence he comes, whither he goes,
What he leaves undone; also what he does:
It also shews you how he runs, and runs,
Till he unto the Gate of Glory comes.

(6)

The Heavenly Footman expands the metaphor of 1 Corinthians 9.24: “So Run, that ye may Obtain” (V:147), the text also of a brief sermon Evangelist delivers to Christian and Faithful in Pilgrim's Progress (86). Milton's Areopagitica develops the same text to encourage wayfaring Christians toward “the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat” (Poems 728). Bunyan enjoins: “Arise Man, be slothful no longer, set Foot, and Heart and all into the way of God, and Run, the Crown is at the end of the Race; there also standeth the loving forerunner, even Jesus” and concludes with a similar exhortatory peroration: “But be sure thou begin betimes, get into the way, Run apace, and hold out to the end. And the Lord give thee a prosperous Journey” (V:140, 178). The treatise defines “Way” as “Christ the Son of Mary, the Son of God” (152), citing John 14.6.

The Heavenly Footman follows the usual format of Bunyan's sermons, and Puritan sermons in general. After 1 Corinthians 9.24 has been “laid down,” Bunyan “opens” its individual words. It considers three definitions of the word run, that is fly, press, continue, with reference to the related texts of Hebrews 12.1 and Philipians 3.14: “Let us run with patience the race that is set before us,” and “I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Jesus Christ.” Bunyan then “clears” the doctrine, that is explores some of its implications, such as that not every runner obtains, that the way is long and the time uncertain, and that the gates may be shut shortly. The remainder of the treatise considers nine directions of how to run, nine motives for running, and nine uses.

Its nine directions make explicit the principles that govern Pilgrim's Progress and provide a procedural rulebook for pilgrimage, most concisely in this passage:

First, get into the way. 2. Then Study on it. 3. Then strip, and lay aside every thing that would hinder. 4. Beware of By-Paths. 5. Do not gaze and stare too much about thee, but be sure to ponder the Path of thy Feet. 6. Do not stop for any that call after thee, whether it be the World, the Flesh, or the Devil; for all these will hinder thy Journey, if possible. 7. Be not Daunted with any discouragements thou meetest with as thou goest. 8. Take heed of stumbling at the Cross. And 9. Cry hard to God for an enlightened heart, and a willing mind, and God give thee a prosperous Journey.

(165-66, and similarly 152-64)

The directives tellingly gloss virtually every unit of Pilgrim's Progress, sometimes individually, sometimes as compounds, but the treatise's sometimes wooden alignments of a simple metaphor contrast markedly with Pilgrim's Progress's complex, multiply referential, and self-conscious artistry in the fully allegorical mode.

The Heavenly Footman secures guidelines for what, at one level, Pilgrim's Progress consists of: a progress, a forward movement toward a goal. It enacts a programmatic allegorical quest, one of the ritual plots Fletcher finds to be characteristic of allegory (184). Viewed within a straightforward novelistic design, Bunyan's pilgrim progresses from the self-bounded to the self-transcending. “The more violent, and dramatic assaults on Christian's faith come early,” as John Knott reminds us, while more subtle temptations founded in fraud and deceptive appearances later predominate (Sword 142-43). Christian's terrors of destruction gradually abate; a regular rhythm of positive and negative encounters emerges; abstraction increases; battles give way to restorations; and anticipations of transcendent glory become increasingly empowered. Vincent Newey describes “the earlier hurried, hesitant, fearfully eager” pilgrim developing into a stable, capable, self-reliant, self-sufficient personality, his wise passiveness supplanting paralysis and disorientation and his personal deciphering of inscriptions and cautionary spectacles replacing passively received explanations (“Bunyan” 35-37). In Newey's formulation, experience gives way to words, “life-and-death confrontations to conversation, psycho-drama to psychological example” (39). In addition, as part I progresses, descriptions and encounters become decreasingly visual and increasingly aural, a development backgrounded in the basic Protestant preference for teaching by the ear over teaching through the eye.

Generally speaking, Christian's travel moves away from problematic sites and toward edification and solace, and the growth of his perceptive capacities indexes his spiritual progress (Knott, Sword 149). The early landscape is aggressively inhospitable though occasionally broken by way stations or other refuges, while late in the story horticultural beneficence in a spiritually reciprocal landscape sustains the pilgrims. What begins as a journey of escape and desperate alienation develops into a quest for a progressively clear destination, a migration to the Heavenly City. The indoor locations dominating the first half of the story—Interpreter's house, House Beautiful—provide relief against generally difficult travel, whereas those in the second half occur as evil and notably confining—Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle. Outdoor sites and encounters tend to threaten until Christian is relieved by a spring of water and pastures that anticipate the blessed horticulture of Beulah Land.

Like allegory generally, Bunyan's travel metaphor is not, however, simply straightforward. The technique is contrapuntal (N. Frye 90); some of its units dissolve where we expect them to resolve. It is true that Christian's forward travel is reinforced by such devices as the proleptic Armed Man tableau at Interpreter's house, the companionate forward movement of Faithful, Evangelist, and Hopeful, Evangelist's prophecy before Vanity Fair, and anticipatory views of the Delectable Mountains from the top of House Beautiful and of the gates of the Celestial City from Hill Clear. But this latter event includes Christian and Hopeful's reflective backward visions of an analogue of their recent experiences with Despair and Doubt from the same vantage. Although most of the pilgrims Christian encounters on the Way are traveling in the same direction as he is, a number of others are “misguided.” Some are going backward on the Way as are Timorous and Mistrust, two “children of the Spies” (gloss 61: characterized as “Children of them that brought up an evil report of the good Land” [61]), Turnaway, and Atheist. The Flatterer leads Christian and Hopeful around in a circle so that they are themselves turned the wrong way, and entangled in a net to boot. The reverse movement of such figures may actually aid the story's forward thrust, but also signals a counterenergy operating within the text. Many readers are troubled by Ignorance's lapse into a byway to Hell “even from the Gates of Heaven” (163) in the penultimate sentence of part I. Although the previous travel has followed the dominant horizontal line, with only minor fluctuations of terrain, our final glimpse of Ignorance secures a vertically dimensioned terrain, and his damnation enforces the dominant transcendence. Ignorance's fate heightens the Puritan view that every moment is potentially damning or salvific and therefore recommends constant self-examination and vigilance.

At least two spatial designs operate simultaneously beneath such “progress,” one quantitative, the other qualitative. The first accords with normal narrative expectations, and proportions positive increases of spiritual energy against negative decreases. The second exploits Puritan epistemological preferences for dichotomies in a sorting-out process that can occur only in retrospect, a model running counter to normal narrative development. Pilgrim's Progress's references to the Way normally distinguish between the right Way, which the text instructs in, and such alternatives as the non-Way or the wrong Way, which must be actively rejected. Wolfgang Iser draws the distinction as between a directly described objective, exemplary road to salvation and a dialogically developed, increasingly subjective certitude of salvation: “Salvation is an a priori precondition for all events in the book; certitude must be gained a posteriori. Man's destiny—the search for salvation—is clear from the beginning; the certainty of finding—the fulfillment of this destiny—is identical with death. The objective goal can only be reached through subjective ‘self-experience,’ and this process is communicated to the reader by the alternation between dream vision and dialogue and the respective tensions arising from this alternation” (9-10). In religious terms, Kaufmann sees the a priori Word and the a posteriori achieved unity of Puritan experience as natural coordinates and speaks similarly of Pilgrim's Progress's “conspicuous superimposition of stasis and linear movement” in which “events only seem to be happening” and its “saving non sequitur of faith” (Pilgrim's Progress 107, 198n., 112, 116). We shall see more fully in later chapters that Puritans particularly honored the a priori, repetitiousness, and the progressive revelation that reprocesses spiritual openings into the illuminations they contain.

The Valley of the Shadow of Death marks the middle and turning point of Pilgrim's Progress part I as narrative, but it signals the epistemological shift as well. The mouth of Hell, situated in its midst, provides a hinge or “dead center” for the change of character and emphasis. Two unnamed men warn Christian: “We were going that way as you are going, and went as far as we durst; and indeed we were almost past coming back, for had we gone a little further, we had not been here to bring the news to thee” (61). Christian faces the same crisis: “Somtimes he had half a thought to go back. Then again he thought he might be half way through the Valley; he remembered also how he had already vanquished many a danger: and that the danger of going back might be much more, then for to go forward; so he resolved to go on” (63). Morning signals a new day and new awakening. Christian is not just delivered from nocturnal hobgoblins but enacts the “reflection” noticed earlier. Literally, a reflection is a “turning backward” or a “looking again” as well as seeing oneself in a mirror. “Now morning being come, he looked back, not of desire to return, but to see, by the light of the day, what hazards he had gone through in the dark” (64). Here Christian is also delivered “from all the dangers of his solitary way” (64) and joins pilgrimage with Faithful and then Hopeful. Verbally, when dialogue replaces the earlier occasional monologues, it externalizes “reflection.” Surprisingly, dialogue increases rather than decreases subjectivity (Iser 9), and when what are discussed are earlier events of the story, dialogues model the study of the self, God's creatures, and the providences characteristic of Puritanism. The reader is likewise regularly held responsible for reinterpretation along the lines of a substructure Fish traces in Pilgrim's Progress, the pattern of a premature interpretation followed by a later emerging “revelatory stage of the episode,” and thus a pattern of deinterpreting, designifying, and “delayed revelation, which has the effect of widening a perspective that had been assumed to be full and adequate” (Self-Consuming Artifacts 226, 228, 237, 238; Fish's italics).

Fish argues the case for Pilgrim's Progress as “antiprogressive,” for the illusion or at least tension of “progress” in it (233, 229, and 250). For him Christian's spatial situation is not linear but cyclical or even static, and he sees three contravening intentions within the narrative subverting normal expectations of progress: “(1) a route whose landmarks and dangers vary with the inner state of those who travel it (2) no direct relationship at all between the point (in space and time) one has reached and the attainment of the ultimate reward, and (3) a pattern of backslidings and providential rescues that works to subvert the self-confidence of pilgrim and reader alike” (232, 229). Fish is correct in calling attention to an illusory dimension to the pilgrim's progress and to the reader's necessary awareness of the problematics of the narrative, but he goes too far I think in concluding that Bunyan therefore intended to “disqualif[y] his work as a vehicle of the insight it pretends to convey” (224-25).

Because allegories assume multiple interpretations, the allegorical transaction is not so much self-consuming as self-reflexive, and Bunyan participates in it primarily to further his Puritan agenda. Theoretically, the two levels of allegory will evoke balanced attention, but in practice one or the other level predominates. While an emphatic literal level restores reader security—sometimes much needed—dissolutions of the literal level stimulate further thematic and abstract pursuits. Thus Quilligan can speak of allegory's plots as evaporating and of its reader's experience of vertigo (68). Such disorientations underwrite the growth and participation that allegory exists to impose. For allegory, the model of action ceases to be a dialectic or carom and becomes instead a spiral, aimed progressively and simultaneously forward, backward, and upward on a three-dimensional continuum (Honig 179).

Søren Kierkegaard formulates the philosophical principle behind the anticlimactic features of Pilgrim's Progress part I: “Though life is lived forwards … it is only understood backwards” (quoted in Talon, John Bunyan 89). Necessarily, anticlimax underlies allegory's mimetic, thematic, and interpretational layering, for generically, allegories will look to the past for the values they affirm, for the biblical authority they serve, and for the representational definition of the good place which is also their narrative goal. They will also progressively and incrementally unfold their inaugural emblem, action, and question, and they are characterized by inconclusive endings (Quilligan 53, Fletcher 174-75). Christianity itself is complexly transtemporal, a matter of remembering the promises, of looking backward to what looks forward, looking backward in order to be redirected forward. Allegory is at once temporal, sequential, atemporal, and countertemporal, all in the service of each other and of a process of provoked and rewarded illuminations and “reflections.”

Notes

1. Sharrock, John Bunyan (1966), 12; Sharrock, Casebook 18. See also Damrosch 150; and Batson 47.

2. Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism 30; Coleridge's Essays 46. The whole of Hosea 12.10 reads: “I have also spoken by the prophets, and I have multiplied visions, and used similitudes, by the ministry of the prophets.”

3. Fletcher 23, 32, 130, 276, 30, 73, 360, 368; and Robertson 286. Nellist argues for Pilgrim's Progress as deconstructing the allegorical mode. For Damrosch Christian's phrase “I thought in my mind” (81-82) “perfectly captures Bunyan's sense of an allegory that bodies forth interior states but never forgets their interiority” (168). Baird collects Bunyan's uses of allegory, similitude, and related diction (14-18), and see Chapter 8 below.

4. Furlong 106-7. Kaufmann distinguishes four kinds of characters: sincere wayfarer, insincere wayfarer, biblical wayside character, and wayside “memorial” (Pilgrim's Progress 94).

5. Van Ghent 30. Harding equates Faithful with “that aspect of faith, or pistis, which is more loyalty to one's own inner experience than faith or belief in something as yet unseen”; “a personification of all the inferior and repressed aspects of Christian himself, but in their positive aspect”; a personification of “what was lacking in Christian's conscious personality” who brings “the vision of the Self nearer to conscious realization” (188). For Talon in John Bunyan, Christian and Faithful “make their way towards the same goal but not the same destiny” (150) and Hopeful is insubstantial and inconsistent (200-201).

6. James Turner and Philip Edwards collapse the travel sequence into comparable stasis by viewing Vanity Fair and the City of Destruction as the same place, only differently apprehended (“Bunyan's” 106 and “Journey” 114). For a list of occasions where pilgrims do quite properly step out of the Way and risk or suffer harm when they do not, see Turner 93 and for interiors turning into exteriors 95.

7. For other Bunyan alignments of sleep with sin, see Some Gospel Truths Opened I:13 and A Few Sighs From Hell I:344, 354. Characteristically in part II of Pilgrim's Progress, God speaks through dreams (e.g., 273).

8. Knott, Sword 140. Knott links travel in the Way with the journeys of Abraham and the Israelites, 140-41. Keeble outlines the numerous layers of simultaneous forward progress in Pilgrim's Progress part I (Literary Culture 264, and see 268-72).

9. Walzer 278. The footman of Prison Meditations 261 is an image from racing, according to its recent editor, Graham Midgeley (VI:321). The twelve instances of footmen in the KJV Bible refer to soldiership, though Jeremiah 12.5 emphasizes their running rather than fighting capacity.

10. Greaves reviews the evidence for dating The Heavenly Footman, and therefore also Pilgrim's Progress part I, in the late 1660s—“Conscience” 31-32. In John Bunyan Talon insists that not The Heavenly Footman but Bunyan's The Strait Gate was the work Bunyan abandoned in favor of the allegory (167), and see his Appendix B, “When Was The Pilgrim's Progress Written?”

A Note on Texts

The edition of Pilgrim's Progress used throughout is The Pilgrim's Progress From This World to That Which is to Come, edited by James Blanton Wharey, 2d ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). Insofar as possible Bunyan's other works are cited from Clarendon Press editions as well, including Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, edited by Roger Sharrock (1962); The Holy War Made by Shaddai Upon Diabolus, edited by Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest (1980); and The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, general editor Roger Sharrock (1976-). For all works not yet available in this edition, I have used The Works of John Bunyan, 3 vols., edited by George Offor (London: Blackie and Son, 1862), except in the case of The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, where I have used the Oxford University Press edition of 1929, with introduction by Bonamy Dobree. The Clarendon Press volumes are cited within the text as volume number (where there is one) and page numbers; Offor's edition is cited within the text as “Offor” plus volume number and page numbers. Unless otherwise specified, I cite the King James Version of the Bible.

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