Man Who Is Chesterton's Allegory In The Innocence Of Father Brown

If you are a mystery fan, you might wish to tackle Chesterton’s Father Brown series. This is a series of a priest who is able to solve crimes because he takes original sin seriously and knows the heart of a sinner. They are not overtly religious but they are very mixed in quality. These short stories were collected in five books of which the first, The Innocence of Father Brown, is the best. Try these and if you like them, you can move on the others. And if you are going to read Chesterton’s fiction, you must try his most famous fiction work, The Man Who was Thursday. It ends up as a sort of allegory and while I think it is over-rated, there are those who swear by it. If you wish to look into Chesterton’s political thought, look up The …show more content…
In fact it seems that more and more people I talk too about Bunyan disliked Pilgrim’s Progress and some hated it with a passion. I admit that this book is very much unlike any other book one will read of my choices. It is an allegory and unfortunately allegories can be hard to follow and difficult to understand. With an allegory, the reader must not only read the picture painted on the page but then go another step and analyze what the picture means. This is much like the parables of Jesus which were not really very clear. Every time He finished one, the disciples had to ask what He meant. Now some pictures in Pilgrim’s Progress are easy to pick up on, such as Pilgrim’s burden falling off at the cross and rolling into the tomb. Others are more difficult and are helped with some understanding of the time and teachings of Bunyan’s world, like Vanity Fair. I suggest before you give up on Bunyan and move on to J.I. Packer with his “this is this and that is that” style of writing, that you give it a new or another chance. First, ignore the fact that if you went to certain Christian schools, you read it when you were way too young to appreciate it. Each great book reaches a person at a certain time in his life and the worst thing to do to a book is to read it before one is ready to read it. This is not so much a child’s book as it is a brilliant exposition of the journey to salvation and beyond. Secondly, just read it and don’t worry about all of the symbolism in it. Allow your mind to see the story like a movie in your head and don’t worry about plot points yet. Then if you find that most of it escaped you, go and get one of the many various annotated editions and use their “cliff notes”. By then, you will hopefully find that this book is better than you remember. If not, skip Bunyan’s other writings and move on. But