John is the boy protagonist in C.S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress.
Published in 1933, the book follows John as he travels through an allegorical landscape in search of the island he glimpses in the distance. The journey explores ideas about desire, reason, authority, Christianity, and the intellectual paths that influenced Lewis before his conversion.
The title intentionally echoes John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, but Lewis’s work is a modern philosophical and religious allegory rather than a sequel. Lewis later wrote that the book was difficult for some readers because its references to contemporary debates were not always explained. The protagonist’s simple name helps frame the journey as a broadly human search rather than the biography of a historical figure.