How Christian is Christian?:
The Unreliable Narrator and The Pilgrim's Progress"...Then Charity said to Christian, Have you a family? Are you a married man?
Chr:I have a Wife and four small Children.
Charity: And why did you not bring them along with you?
Chr.: Then Christian wept and said, Oh! how willingly I would have done it! but they were all of them utterly averse to my going on Pilgrimage.
Charity: But you should have talked to them, and have endeavoured to have shown them the Danger of being behind.
Chr.: So I did...."Of course we see that Christian has done nothing of the sort. Immediately upon meeting Evangelist, he considers only his own safety. Indeed, he runs from his family, hands in his ears that he may not hear their pleas. And his cry is only for himself: "Life, life, eternal life!" Christian, however, does not divulge his rather cowardly behavior to Charity, and makes his family out to be such a burden that she congratulates him on freeing himself from them!
Thus we see that salvation, such as it is, in The Pilgrim's Progress, is fundamentally a selfish act. It does not involve the society which surrounds and creates an individual, but only that individual him- or herself, as if such a being, separate from others, could exist. Christian's journey is a rending of the bonds of family, society, and thus spurning of the very values (charity, faith, etc.) it is meant to espouse. Salvation is directed inward, in an inherently limited manner, and refuses any responsibility for others.
Moreover, because Christian is alone, the truth of his journey is mutable according to his whim. With no others except those he abandons on his journey to confirm or deny his story, he alters it to his advantage. We see this transgressive quality most clearly....
That's about all the nonsense I can write for now. I've probably got tenure somewhere just for that little section.
