On 'The Pilgrim's Progress'

"In the course of his journey the hero, named Christian, learns to understand the world as an allegory. He comes to perceive his experience as a series of signs that point toward nonmaterial, spiritual referents, and this constitutes his liberation. But before he can escape from prison, he must become aware that he is in one. The progress toward an allegorical interpretation of reality is simultaneously a process of alienation from the mundane world of experience. *The Pilgrim's Progress* shows us a man who becomes a stranger to the world, to the extent of rejecting empirical sense perception, as well as the laws, morality, and behavioral standards of society. The first lesson Christian learns after his conversion is that 'Mr. Worldly Wiseman is an alien.'"

- David Hawke, Intro to the Barnes and Noble edition of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress

Bonus:

Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukac wrote a definition of the novel genre in his *Theory of the Novel*: the novel genre is "the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God." From the same Intro mentioned above.