The Figural Logic of the Sequel and the Unity of The Pilgrim's Progress

If after all, they still of you shall doubtThinking that you like Gipsies go about,In naughty-wise the Countrey to defileOr that you seek good People to beguileWith things unwarrantable: Send for meAnd I will Testifie, you Pilgrims be;Yea, I will Testifie that only youMy Pilgrims are; And that alone will do.

(2.136)¹

As sequels go, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Part II has enjoyed enormous success. While other sequels to notable works from the period are now read only by a select group of specialists, Bunyan's sequel has been in print continuously since 1684 and is now bound with most editions of part 1 as part of a single book.² The Pilgrim's Progress, Part II, though, was not Bunyan's first attempt to continue the enormously popular allegory that he published six years earlier. Bunyan's first sequel to The Pilgrim's Progress, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), extended the allegory by inverting it. To supplement the allegory of "him that was going to heaven," Mr. Badman tells the story of "the life and death of the ungodly, and of their travel from this world to hell."³ From the theological perspective, Mr. Badman is "far more successful than The Pilgrim's Progress, in that it conveys its doctrine effectively while rigorously containing the 'story.'"⁴ Bunyan soon learned, however, that readers wanted more of the concrete narrative of The Pilgrim's Progress, not its abstract theology. By most accounts, iot until Thomas Sherman published the unauthorized sequel The Second Part of the Pilgrim's Progress (1682) that Bunyan felt a need to contiarrative that he had begun in 1678.⁵

If nothing else, the continued success of The Pilgrim's Progress, Part II, compared with the relative obscurity of The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, demonstrates that audience expectations for sequels have changed very little in the last years. Readers who have developed a relationship with a book look to sequels for what Betty A. Schellenberg describes as "an intimate conversation among a trustworthy author, familiar readers, [and] well-beloved characters."⁶ Awareness of these expectations accounts for the tremendous proliferation of both authorized and unauthorized literary sequels in post-Restoration England. But the literary sequel itself has a long and distinguished genealogy stretching back to Homer's Odyssey and incorporating such formidable early modern works as Rabelais' Gargantua, Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, Cervantes's Don Quixote, Part II, and Milton's Paradise Regained. In the eighteenth century, two of the works that routinely contend for the title of "first English novel"-Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Richardson's Pamela-were each followed up by at least one authorized sequel penned by their author and numerous unauthorized sequels claiming to continue the adventures of the original characters.⁷

Inherent in any sequel is the narrative expectation that Frank Kermode has labeled "the sense of an ending," or the belief that a narrative should start at the beginning of a story, move through a recognizable middle, and culminate with a definitive end. For Kermode, this overwhelming drive toward closure is ultimately theological in nature and finds deep roots in the narrative structure of the Christian Bible:

The Bible is a familiar model of history. It begins at the beginning ("In the beginning . . .") and ends with a vision of the end ("Even so, come, Lord Jesus"); the first book is Genesis, the last Apocalypse. Ideally, it is a wholly concordant structure, the end is in harmony with the beginning, the middle with beginning and end. The end, Apocalypse, is traditionally held to resume the whole structure, which it can only do by figures predictive of that part of it which has not been historically revealed. The Book of Revelation made its way slowly into the canon. . . . But once established it showed, and continues to show, a vitality and resource that suggest its consonance with our more naïve requirements of fiction.⁸

These "naïve requirements" that readers...