Preview

Dantes Inferno

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1229 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Dantes Inferno
The Inferno is more than just a fictional story about someone traveling through life. It is actually more like an autobiographical journey of life through its author, Dante Alighieri’s. He basically wrote with the personal purpose of recording where all of the people he came in contact within his life, will go when they die. This could be one of three places; Hell, Purgatory, or Heaven. He went on to design specific, fitting punishments or rewards based on each person’s life. Dante then tied this all together and made himself a character that walks the entire length of the abstracted world. Written in the early 1300s by an angry Dante living in exile, he literally describes a man who has been trapped, and must find a way to escape. He also includes the hidden Renaissances darkness, and the people who are Manipulating. As Dante passes through the depths of hell he begins to see sins that would be punished and tortured in medieval times to the same acts that are displayed in the era of the Renaissance, and yet are treated differently. The Renaissances era that had a lot of influence on Dante and the journey through hell.
Whether they were someone that betrayed him in his political career or the girl that he fell in love with when he was 9 years old, he found a way to integrate them into the Inferno. It’s not hard to notice that in the symbols, Dante considers trust and loyalty to be one of the most important human characteristics. He basically felt this way due to the point that he was betrayed and exiled away from his beloved homeland, by the pope. It is because of this that he places offenders of breaking these at the center of hell. Dante was exiled from Florence in 1302 and this is where his feelings that helped structured the story. When he comes out of the dark forest Dante is blocked by the three beasts. The beasts are a lion, a leopard, and wolf. The lion is seen to poses pride, the leopards' role is that of lust and the wolf represents is greed. The three

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    The Inferno begins when Dante strays off the rightful and straight path of moral truth and gets lost in a dark wood. He gets attack by three beasts that symbolize different sins. Fortunately, he then meets the spirit of the Roman epic poet Virgil. Virgil to the rescue! He’s an appropriate guide because he’s very much like Dante, a fellow writer and famous poet. For the rest of the Inferno, Virgil takes Dante on a guided tour of Hell, through all its nine circles and back up into the air of the mortal world.…

    • 386 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Inferno Dante makes fantastic use of details and imagery, explaining his trip from circle to circle lower and deeper into the pits of hell that lead him to purgatory. Dante created this work to represent the journey from the soul to God in the afterlife. This piece was very well accepted in the sense that even though no original copy in Dante’s writing survived, hundreds of copies had already been found of it. Dante used representation of the Medieval view on the afterlife as it had developed in the Western church to write his epic. Although it is said that the original copy of The Divine Comedy was lost to time, you can purchase the paperback copies of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso at Amazon.com for $15.08. I originally chose to focus…

    • 163 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Inferno is Dante’s first poem in his The Divine Comedy. The poem starts with Dante traveling in dark where he loses his way. He is trying to get to his beloved Beatrice who is waiting for him. She sends ghost of Virgil to bring Dante to her. In order to get to Heaven, Dante will have to go through heaven, something that almost everyone did in Christian world. At the beginning, they enter the gate of hell. The First Circle of the Hell is for those people who never done anything good or bad in their life, here they run all day long with hornets biting them. In the Second Circle of the Hell, Dante sees that the some souls are stuck in a devastating storm. In the Third Circle of Hell, Dante sees that Gluttonous…

    • 317 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dante the Pilgrim visits many different people while on his journey through Hell in Dante’s Inferno. Each one of these tormented souls are punished for their crimes against themselves, society, and God. Most of these personalities bring no surprise as they are robbers, murderers, and blasphemers. However, the amount of Church authority figures in Hell is staggeringly high. The ironic revelation is never fully dissected by Dante but the implications of this writing may cause the public to turn a leery eye towards the Church. Throughout Dante’s Inferno, the sights of “Holy” men rotting in Hell create a rift between the teachings of the church and the common citizens.…

    • 744 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dante and Virgil are outside the eighth Circle of Hell, known as Malebolge. The circle has a wall along the outside, and has a circular pit in the center. The ridges create ten separate pits. This is where the people receive their punishment for fraud. This is where Virgil and Dante see souls from one side to another. The demons with great whips cause pain to the souls when they come to the demon’s reach, which then force the souls to the other ridge. There is an Italian that Dante recognize and he speaks to him. The Italian tells Dante that he lived in Bologna, and now is there to sell his sister. The pit is for the Seducers and the Panders, and then Dante saw the Jason of mythology who abandoned Medea. When Virgil and Dante had…

    • 936 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Dante’s Inferno Critique

    • 2263 Words
    • 10 Pages

    Dante’s Inferno is a story about how two men and their travels through hell, the different levels of hell, who was in them, and what they did during their time on Earth. There were nine circles and some of them had different levels inside the circles for example the seventh circle of hell is divided between three smaller circles. Then they eventually emerge back out onto the earth but on the opposite side of the earth from where they had started.…

    • 2263 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The Inferno is the first part of Dante Alighieri's epic three-part poem, The Divine Comedy. Dante, in the poem develops many themes throughout the adventures of his travelers from political to religious. The Inferno is a work that Dante used to express his ideas of God's divine justice. It is a horror story we can read from the safety of our armchair, just as the characters, like someone playing a virtual-reality game, wanders through every scene unscathed.…

    • 2632 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Dante feels hell is a necessary, painful first step in any man's spiritual journey, and the path to the blessed after-life awaits anyone who seeks to find it, and through a screen of perseverance, one will find the face of God. Nonetheless, Dante aspires to heaven in an optimistic process, to find salvation in God, despite the merciless torture chamber he has to travel through. As Dante attempts to find God in his life, those sentenced to punishment in hell hinder him from the true path, as the city of hell in Inferno…

    • 1408 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    One must understand that in abiding by Catholic doctrine and teachings his rankings of Circles represent the Divine Justice that draws the whole story together. Evil, which is the reason behind sin is the ultimate breaking of God’s will because the evil actions are in direct violation of God’s commands. Fraud is seen with such disdain by Dante because it is a direct violation of trust and love, which are seen as two of the purest emotions by Dante. Divine love is seen by Dante as the ultimate power and in many ways shapes his views and understandings of the underworld. Dante views his love that he feels towards Beatrice as the representation of true love because of the pure intentions in which they are founded. Many of the worst sins in Hell are perversions of pure intentions and demonstrate Dante’s views on sins. These views are unquestionably founded in the fact that he was betrayed by his beloved city of Florence when he was exiled. This can help to explain why Dante places Cassius, Brutus, and Judas in the mouths of Satan because of the direct violations of love and trust which were committed by these…

    • 1822 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Like in the Inferno, where the gates of Hell begin the journey to the bottom, so life is began by birth, and the journey to Eternity begins. Some lives are more easily lead than others, like some of the punishments in Dante's version of Hell are worse than others. Although in Hell, there is no hope, not even the hope of hope, the journey that Dante and Virgil take can be compared with the journey of life. Just the fact that Dante has someone to guide him can be comparison, everyone in life has a Guardian Angel assigned to them, as Dante had his own guide in his journey. But to compare all parts of life to the Inferno, one must start at the beginning to realized the end. The birth of body, and the death of the soul.…

    • 1072 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Dante Essay Ap

    • 1023 Words
    • 5 Pages

    The Inferno is probably the most realistic section of the Divine Comedy because it comes closer to fitting the people's perception of what Hell is really like then than Purgatory and Paradise do. People's mental image of Hell is an evil, dark, and scary place that is full of fire and that is exactly the way Dante depicts it. People are eager to see, hear, and read about violence, blood, and gore and the Inferno is full of it which helps the reader to pay closer attention to it. In a sense Dante is trying to scare the righteousness into people. Dante himself became scared when he read the inscription above the gate of Hell that read "ABANDON EVERY HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE" because he did not realize that the inscription was only intended for those who had already died. The…

    • 1023 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dante Inferno

    • 317 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Amidst a world that is constantly new, changing, and terrifying, the comforting voice of reason explains everything to Dante the pilgrim and the reader. He describes the geography of the place, why sinners are punished according to their sins, why we see what we do - in short, Virgil always provides the reason why things are the way they are. This is essentially the role of rationality in a philosophic sense of the world. As we know, Dante was a student of philosophy, so he was well familiar with philosophers' tools to explain the world. Virgil therefore symbolizes human reason in a very didactic sense.Viewed in this frame of reference, then, we can see that Dante's placement of Virgil in the Divine Comedy reflects his struggle to reconcile these two views. First, Virgil's separation from Paradiso is absolutely essential. That Virgil doesn't accompany Dante into heaven shows that Dante the writer believes that his two views must be kept separate. Classical reason, symbolized in Virgil, has no place in the revelation of Christianity and must remain autonomous. Dante hopes to avoid the conflict by keeping the two separate in his mind - as separate as Virgil and Beatrice are from one another. irgil also represents the best bridge between Dante's conflicting ideas of classicism and Christianity. In his 4th Eclogue, Virgil wrote of the coming of a little boy who would restore order and bring about happiness. In hindsight, it is eerily reminiscent of the story of Christ, but there is no way Virgil could have known about Jesus at the time of his writing. The 4th Eclogue has intrigued scholars for centuries, and Dante was no different. Virgil's message was prophetic, he thought, which made him the most "Christian" of the pagans. Virgil, as a pagan poet possibly predicting Christ's birth, represented for Dante the closest link between his conflicting fascinations with Christianity and classicism.…

    • 317 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Dante's Inferno

    • 3332 Words
    • 14 Pages

    In Dante’s Inferno we read of the nine circles of Hell and why souls are put there based on Dante’s Christian view of their sins. There are people suffering in the cores of Hell due to lust, adultery, suicide, gluttony, greed, etc. Souls suffer as they grieve their contrapasso punishment for the atrocities they have done while in their bodies on Earth. They have been traitors to the word of God and now they are destined to spend their eternities in Hell where they constantly remember the sins they have caused against the bible, Christ and God. Though there are the souls in Limbo that suffer from never knowing the word of God. These souls in Limbo are those that were Pagans and the unbaptized infants. But now the question is why does Dante place these souls in these certain circles of Hell and how does he decide? Dante lived in a Midlevel time of Christianity and based his view on what his religion taught them. How does Dante’s view of Hell in his time compare to Christianity’s modern view of Hell. I myself being of the same religion, I have come to believe that everyone can be forgiven as long as they truly repent the sins they have committed. It is not if you commit one sin that you are doomed to live your life in Hell, but rather that if you ask for forgiveness and repent the right way you can still make your way to heaven.…

    • 3332 Words
    • 14 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dante's Inferno

    • 272 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In Dante's Inferno, Hell is described in vivid detail in the eyes of Dante, the main character and author. Sinners are eternally punished with tortures that fit their sins. This idea of retributive justice and the role of human reason in the form of Virgil are the two main themes in the poem. Canto VIII contains Dis, the capital of Hell and is most representative of these themes.…

    • 272 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In The Inferno, hell is in a spiral shape, and is divided up by the seriousness of the sin committed. The sinners are stuck in their location in hell where there punishment fit the crime that they committed. At the top of hell is where what Dante considered the least sinful people belonged. This is the home of the people who suffered from lust, and gluttony.…

    • 312 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays