A Few Directions for Reading

Abstract

In reading The Pilgrim’s Progress, the reader ought to give primary attention, first of all, to it as a story. After reading it as an adventure story, the reader begins next to think of the work as a journey, an essential organising principle of various narratives in literature. Readers of the Odyssey and the Aeneid, for example, know that the basic structure of these works is also a journey. The journey may also take the special form of a pilgrimage, as in The Canterbury Tales and The Pilgrim’s Progress, even though the pilgrimages are very different in the two works. In the Christian tradition, the pilgrimage usually depicts an individual journeying from a state of being lost to a state of blessedness. The pilgrim in The Pilgrim’s Progress wants that blessed state in God, and the pilgrimage is the progress of a pilgrim, later named Christian, from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City.