Slough of Despond

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The Slough of Despond is a deep bog in John Bunyan's allegory The Pilgrim's Progress, into which the character Christian sinks under the weight of his sins and his sense of guilt. "It is the low ground where the scum and filth of a guilty conscience, caused by conviction of sin, continually gather, and for this reason it is called the Slough of Despond." ^[1]

It has been referred to frequently in subsequent literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale The Celestial Railroad is a satirical contrast between Bunyan's A Pilgrim's Progress and Hawthorne's perception of the current state of society. In Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights the character Mr. Heathcliff likens his son's state of depression to having been dropped "into a Slough of Despond". In Horatio Hornblower: The Even Chance, by C. S. Forester, Midshipman Archie Kennedy describes Hornblower's new home as "His Majesty's ship of the line Justinian, known elsewise among her intimates as the good ship Slough of Despond." In Mary McCarthy's novel The Group (1954), "Kay saw that [her husband, Harald] was sinking into a Slough of Despond (they had coined this name for his sudden, Scandinavian fits of depression)…" In Harlan Ellison's short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1967) the last five surviving humans are tortured by a godlike artificial intelligence named AM. The narrator relates how, among other harrowing experiences, "We passed through the Slough of Despond."^[2]