The Pilgrim's Regress

After talking about how much I like C.S. Lewis, I have to confess that I am giving up on The Pilgrim's Regress. It was the first book he wrote after his conversion, and it's a variation of The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan.

I am about halfway through the book now, and it's losing me. There are several different reasons for this:

First, Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress used easily recongnizable and definable concepts as allegorical characters: people like Timorous (fear), Piety, Christian (the main character), and Evangelist. In order to understand the characters of The Pilgrim's Progress, all you really need is a dictionary. Lewis, however, is using philosophical movements. These are almost incomprehensible if you haven't studied them. You can look them up in a dictionary or encyclopedia, of course, but without a philosophical background, you (I) may not understand their references.

Second, Lewis sometimes throws in Greek, Latin, or other linguistic quotations. These are neither translated or attributed. I have studied Greek and Latin; I could figure them out if I worked at it. But it's very distracting. And if it's distracting for me, when I know the languages, what must it be like for people who don't?

Third, the continual references to the dream framework make it too easy to dismiss the points that Lewis is trying to make. If you can say, "Oh, but it was just a dream," it almost invalidates the reality of the situation. Dreams are supposed to be unreal and illogical; the allegory that I think Lewis is trying to convey is not.

Basically, I'm just too stupid ignorant to read this book right now. It's more work to understand the layers than I'm willing to put in, and it's not interesting enough on a story level to make it worth reading without that deeper understanding.


It's really too bad, though, because it's the type of book I think I would really enjoy if I understood it better. Maybe I'll keep my eyes out for an annotated version or see if someday I can take a class on Lewis that explains it better. But right now, I'm giving up and moving on to The Other Boleyn Girl.