A comparative study of Bunyan`s The Pilgrim`s Progress and Ghoochani`s Siahate Gharb

There is a close affinity between The Pilgrim`s Progress by John Bunyan (1628-1688) and Siahate Gharb (A Journey to The Unseen World) by Aghanajafi Ghoochani (1878-1944). Siahate Gharb is the story of a man who dies and narrates his difficult journey to paradise. The Pilgrim`s Progress narrates the journey of a man from the ‘city of destruction’ to the ‘celestial city’. Although these books are not written by literary writers, they were written in the forms of novel. Analyzing these books reveals that Bunyan and Ghoochani, as religious preachers, utilized the didactic role of literature to spread and promote the principles of their religions. American school of comparative literature believes the reason of the similarity between two literary works from two different contexts must be in the circumstances that both writers lived in. Therefore, the present study intends to explore the historical, political, social and cultural circumstances of England in the sixteenth century and those of Iran in the twentieth century. This analysis reveals that the decay of religion and religious principles, as the sole path of redemption, compelled Ghoochani and Bunyan to turn toward didactic literature.