Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
First Person (Peripheral)
The pronoun "I" occurs so rarely in this story that it's sometimes easy to forget that it's all "just a dream." And this is for good reason.
The dream is Bunyan's pretext for presenting these Christian teachings in allegorical form. Telling us that the content of the story is a dream, Bunyan has the freedom to be as non-specific as he likes about time and place while at the same time using images of the physical world to flesh out his story.
In this way, Bunyan is able to both refer to the Real World and to his Dream World—he's able to let us immerse ourselves in the story and be aware that a story is being told.
You'd think that this would dumb down the events of the main story; that it would make Christian's journey less believable. But instead, the reader becomes very invested in two stories and, in a larger way, invested in the idea of stories.
That may sound like lit-nerd gobbledygook, so let's use the insane 1980s classic movie The Princess Bride as an example of a similar setup. (If you haven't seen it, you simply must. This is an Official Shmoop Announcement.) In The Princess Bride, we get two stories: the rollicking fairy tale full of pirates and scary rats and Andre the Giant and the frame story of a granddad reading his son a bedtime fairy tale about—you got it—pirates and scary rats and Andre the Giant.
We don't believe in the main pirate-rats-Andre story any less because of this frame story. But our attention is brought to the fact that a story is being told—and thus to how stories are important to everyday people like the granddad, his grandson, and even us as viewers.
This is what Bunyan is doing—a) he's giving us an allegory, b) he's directing our attention to the fact that it is an allegory, c) he's also directing our attention to the fact that the Bible is full of allegories, and d) he's asking us to think long and hard about what we can absorb from these allegories.
Phew. If that sounds like a lot it's because it is a lot… but it's also a lot of fun to read. Because although The Pilgrim's Progress doesn't have scary rats or pirates, it does have chained lions, fights with the Devil, and a giant who is way less lovable than Andre.