Stage 1

The opening portrays the most central idea of the work: the journey. The Pilgrim’s Progress is about travel and the meaning that one man’s travel comes to acquire. The trip is one of discovery and learning new things. Christian is journeying not to come home but to leave home, or rather to make a new home for himself in an unfamiliar place, the Celestial City. Because he believes his town is destroyed, he literally cannot go home again. He heads for a better place through his journey to the Celestial City. Therefore the geographical wandering across the land is also a mythic advancement, a spiritual development, which is the “progress” referred to in the title. The journey to the Celestial City is a solitary experience. Christian is first introduced alone and crying with a book in his hand, and he remains alone for large portions of the story. Secondary characters come and go, but Christian remains. In part, his solitude is a necessary aspect of his Protestant faith, which holds that salvation comes not through church attendance and group ritual but through private prayer and introspection. Bunyan shows the reader that faith is individual, so Christian must be alone to practice it.