America’s national epic was not written in meter and verse. Nor, for that matter, was it written by an American. Yet The Pilgrim’s Progress is nonetheless the primal American story, the account of our mad flight from order and lonely quest for grace.
Hemmed in by civilization, resentful of kin, a man strikes out for the wild, hoping to shed his burden of guilt. He has gone by many names—Natty, Ishmael, Huck, Sal—but the name Bunyan gave him was his first: Christian. This book will make a Traveller of thee, Bunyan warned, and we have been on the road ever since.
Christian wants to run. Where to? Anywhere—as long as it’s away from duty. “I know not whither to go,” Christian says, but go he must. Along with Huck, he wants to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest,” away from “sivilization.” Like Herman Melville’s Ishmael, he wants to get away from that place where men are “tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks”—and, we should add, bound to women and children. As Christian runs, his wife and sons and daughters cry after him, but he is deaf to their pleading: “The Man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on.” He is Kerouac’s Sal Paradise: “Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness—everything is behind him.”