The Pilgrim's Regress

“Better tell a lie, old chap, better tell a lie. Easiest for all concerned.”

In advising John to lie, the Steward—a figure of authority who upholds truth and integrity and enforces the rules set by the Landlord—reveals the hypocrisy and fear-based control in Puritania. In his opening chapter, Lewis establishes the spiritual doubt and discontent that John feels in the religious community of his childhood, emphasizing the need for his titular quest.

“There in the grass beside him sat a laughing brown girl of about his own age, and she had no clothes on. ‘It was me you wanted,’ said the brown girl. ‘I am better than your silly Islands.’”

Lewis uses the motif of “brown girls” throughout the narrative to represent carnal distractions from the pursuit of spiritual truth—in this case, John’s quest for the Island. Lewis’s motif reflects a common, misogynistic trope of Christian allegory that positions women as sexual temptresses attempting to dissuade a pious man from his true spiritual calling. Here, the girl in the woods dismisses John’s spiritual longing as “silly,” introducing a distraction of immediate sexual gratification that temporarily distracts John from the abstract yearning for the Island.

“‘There is no Landlord?’ ‘There is absolutely no such thing—I might even say no such entity—in existence. There never has been and never will be.’”

The categorical denial of the Landlord’s existence by Mr. Enlightenment represents a radical form of skepticism, highlighting Lewis’s Critique of Modern Philosophical and Cultural Trends. For John, who has lived under constant fear of the Landlord’s rules and punishments, Mr.