The protagonist of C.S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress is named John.
Published in 1933, The Pilgrim’s Regress was Lewis’s first published work of prose fiction. It follows John, a young man living in the land of Puritania, as he sets out on a journey after experiencing a troubling dream and a desire for an unknown island. The structure deliberately echoes John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Lewis’s allegory explores philosophical and theological ideas through encounters with personified concepts and landscapes. The journey reflects his own intellectual movement from atheism toward Christianity, although the book is not a literal autobiography.
The novel is sometimes confused with Lewis’s other fictional protagonists. Elwin Ransom belongs to the Space Trilogy, Orual narrates Till We Have Faces, and Digory Kirke appears in The Chronicles of Narnia. John, by contrast, is the central traveler in this early allegorical work.