Bunyan's allegory uses the everyday world of common experience as a metaphor for the spiritual journey of the soul toward God. , Talkative, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, the Giant Despair).

But in the end he reaches Beulah Land, where he awaits the crossing of the river of death and his entry into the heavenly city. "Pilgrim's Progress" was enormously influential not only as a best-selling inspirational tract in the late 17th century, but as an ancestor of the 18th-century English novel, and many of its themes and ideas have entered permanently into Western culture.