Which C.S. Lewis novel is an allegorical retelling of a journey toward faith?

The Pilgrim’s Regress is C.S. Lewis’s allegorical retelling of a journey toward faith.

Published in 1933, the book was Lewis’s first work of prose fiction. Its subtitle, An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism, signals its intellectual and religious purpose. The central character, John, leaves his home in search of an island and encounters figures and places representing ideas, temptations, and competing philosophies.

The structure deliberately recalls John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a classic Christian allegory. Lewis’s version, however, reflects his own intellectual path and the debates of the early twentieth century. The book was written soon after his conversion to Christianity.

Readers sometimes confuse it with The Great Divorce, another Lewis allegory about choices and eternity, or with Till We Have Faces, his retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth. The Pilgrim’s Regress is specifically the work that most directly depicts Lewis’s conversion-era intellectual journey.