The Pilgrim's Progress Section 1 Summary

Apology

• Bunyan begins the "Apology" for his book with the statement that, in fact, he had no intention to produce it. The key word in this stanza is "mode."
• He did take pen-in-hand, he did mean to write something, but not necessarily in this "mode." This word refers to two things throughout the apology, and they're actually the very things he is "apologizing" for or explaining to the reader: the decision to write in allegory, and the decision to publish his story into a "little book."
• As he explains, the author was already writing another book (most likely Grace Abounding, Bunyan's spiritual autobiography which he wrote before The Pilgrim's Progress) when he writes that he "fell suddenly into an allegory"(line 9).
• In other words, he was writing about real life people and places and discussing spirituality in an abstract way, when he just sort of began telling a story.
• What's really key here is the way he writes of it just "happening." Saying that he "fell" into allegory makes it sound like this wasn't even a choice at all.
• Because the "events" of the allegorical story (the off-shoot of the other book he was writing) began multiplying so fast, he decided that they needed to be their own book, so that they didn't take over the other.
• In stanza three Bunyan speaks specifically to the "mode" of publishing. Like having "fallen" into allegory, he writes of having had no intention to publish his story. "I did it my own self to gratify," he says (line 24).
• The story itself was not meant to please anyone else—friends, congregation, or a "public." Writing it, and writing in this allegorical form, was important for Bunyan himself.
• "Still as I pulled it came" (line 32). This is how Bunyan describes the experience of writing this story. The analogy is comparing the way his story came out of his imagination with the act of spinning thread from wool.
• (Unless you yourself happen to be a wool-spinner, you might want to try to remember the demos from farm-day fieldtrips … In order to create the thread, the wool fibers are twisted and pulled over the rim of the spinning wheel. And as the spinner pulls the thread, the wool continues to twist over the wheel and "come" to the spinner's hands as new thread.)
• When the story was finished, the author asked his friends what he should do with it. They all disagreed about whether to publish or not.
• The author explains that, because of this disagreement, he decided to publish. This way, the matter could be decided by the public instead. And if some people didn't want him to publish … well, they could read something else.
• Bunyan then begins to explain/defend the merit of writing in the form of allegory.
• Principally, he's countering the argument that a story will obscure or "darken" more straightforward writing and preaching about spiritual matters. In other words: why not just write a sermon?
• Bunyan's first analogy for the worth of allegory is how dark skies bring rain, the "darkness" of the clouds standing for the opacity of allegories that give forth conceptual/spiritual insights.
• Three more metaphors follow for the good effect of allegory on readers.
• The first metaphor is the lure that fishermen use to catch fish. Personal fishing experience here? Helpful, but not essential. Basically, he argues, fisherman have to use a variety of lures, tackle, and strategies when fishing because different fish are attracted to different things. If he only used one, he'd miss out on a whole world of other kinds.
• Okay, metaphor number two (like Bunyan, we'll let the three build up and then see how they work together to make the author's point).
• The second metaphor is of a "fowler."
• (Not exactly a job you'd find listed these days on Craigslist, but in the 17th century a fowler was a person who specifically hunted birds.) Similar to the fisherman, the fowler has to use a wide variety tactics: "His guns, his nets, his lime-twigs, light and bell; / He creeps, he goes, he stands; yea who can tell / Of all his postures?" (lines 83-85).
• Different birds require a huge variety of different traps and approaches. A good fowler is one who can adapt, who can know whether to creep or stand. (Sound like a familiar situation?)
• The final metaphor is for things of value that hide in seemingly worthless objects, like a pearl in an oyster.
• Nature, basically, is full of examples of how precious things develop and live inside of ugly exteriors. This goes along well with the distrust of exteriors that Bunyan develops as a theme throughout the story.
• So, think of all these metaphors together now. Clearly, this allegorical style is a type of lure that Bunyan is using. Some people may respond to straightforward sermons, he's saying, but not everyone can be "caught" that way.
• Others (arguably many others) are drawn in more by stories. And, while stories may seem trivial and worthless to real spiritual concerns, Bunyan is arguing that they can in fact house some of the most precious truths in the world.
• "Some men by feigning words as dark as mine, / make truth to spangle, and its rays to shine" (lines 103-104). Awesome couplet, and a pretty good rhetorical argument too. In other words, "feigned" or fictional writing, which some people may call obscure, can actually make the "truth" in it shine all the more brightly. Readers will recognize it all the more as truth because it's set off against fiction.
• Bunyan then faces the critique that his metaphors lack "solidness" and that it's only fitting to write about Biblical teachings in a straightforward way. The author counters this by writing how Jesus himself speaks in metaphors in the Gospels.
• Wise people will be willing to "stoop," to look for truth and discern it in unexpected and humble places. Bunyan holds that God reveals truth to men in the everyday world—so why shouldn't books imitate this?
• He repeats how many Biblical figures wrote and spoke metaphorically—the prophets, Jesus, Paul. So… if someone's going to criticize his writing style, Bunyan's saying, that person is basically dissing the Bible. And this, my friends, is what we call very clever rhetoric.
• The most important thing, Bunyan continues, is not how a book looks or what style it's written in, but how much truth it has in it and whether it actually guides and helps people who read it.
• Bunyan says that he wants to close out with three points, directed at anyone who still disagrees with the style of his book.
• The poet asserts first that he is perfectly entitled to express his ideas in this allegorical form. No authority "denies" him the right. In fact, he not only has "leave" but "example" to write Christian teachings in an allegorical form.
• The poet's second claim is that truth and God himself should be the judge of our works. Again, this is a kind of proof-is-in-the-pudding argument.
• The poet thirdly reminds us again of the many places where the Bible uses allegory and metaphor. Because the supreme authority uses this method, then Bunyan doesn't need to be worried about "smothering" truth with his style.
• Bunyan summarizes the substance and purpose of his story: to depict the life of someone following the Christian life and seeking heaven (and what he does and doesn't do to get there) and to depict the lives of people who set out "as if" they're after heaven, but who fall by the wayside.
• He claims that this book will "make a traveler" (a.k.a. a Christian) of anyone who takes it up and follows it. It actually has the power to convert people—to make them see what they haven't seen before and to make them want to change.
• Again, Bunyan reminds his reader that, even while this will sound like a fictional story, it is based completely on Christian teaching. It only seems like "novelty."
• Bunyan concludes the Apology by posing a long series of rhetorical questions to his reader. Essentially, he is telling us what his book, its style and content, will give through all of these questions: entertainment and instruction at the same time.
• His last line tells the reader that if he has said "yes" to these questions, to "lay my book, thy head and heart together." In other words, this book will speak to both your reason and your feelings, and help the head and heart to speak to each other.
• Bunyan begins by giving the frame of his story. The setting, he tells us, is a "den" or jail, in which he falls asleep and, as he tells us "dreamed a dream." With only one interruption, the rest of the book after this first sentence narrates what occurs in Bunyan's dream, what he refers to in the title as a "similitude" or allegory for the Christian life.