Diction In Dante's The Inferno

Often, we cannot see the good until we have experienced the bad. Dante Alighieri, a poet who makes himself the main character in his Divine Comedy, finds himself lost in a dark wood at the start of The Inferno. Though he sees a safe path out of the wood towards an alluring light, he is forced to take an alternate route through an even darker place. As the ending of the pilgrim Dante’s voyage is bright and hopeful, Alighieri the poet aims to encourage even the most sinful Christians to hope for a successful end. Thus, Dante the pilgrim goes to hell in The Inferno to better understand the nature of sin and its consequences in order to move closer to salvation; his journey an allegory representing that of the repenting Christian soul.

Smiling.. Shaking head, and acting like everything is understood and okay is a common gesture people show when they are told something they are incapable of putting together or understanding. This feeling of cluelessness or embarrassment most commonly occurs when someone uses an allusion to describe a noun. Most people use allusions everyday and have no idea that they are doing so. Allusions are an excellent way to build someone's confidence or put them in down in a sneaky and sly way. Using allusions is quite simple; comparing someone or something that has a specific representation or meaning to a person or group. This allows: authors, friends, and even enemies to indirectly imply a reference. The Book Dante’s inferno is filled with a plethora of allusions from small references to big that take a significant amount of elaboration and background knowledge to understand completely. Including Greek emperors and queens being alluded including: Virgil, Pope Celestine V, and many others.

Dante gives a picture perfect example of their torment. It was said that, “And as they scrubbed and clawed themselves, their nails / drew down the scabs the way a knife scrapes bream / or some other fish with even larger scales” (Alighieri XXIX.82-84). The impression that Dante gives forces the reader into picturing the sinners drag their dirty nails into their prickly, scabbed skin, so rapidly and intense, that he compares it to a knife grating the scales of a fish. Dante also uses visual imagery to describe the lives of the gluttons. Since the gluttons spent their lives consuming massive amounts of food and drink, they represented themselves as garbage. Therefore, they were treated as such in Hell. The reader is able to visualize the punishment of a glutton through Dante’s vivid expression: “Huge hailstones, dirty water, and black snow / pour from the dismal air to putrefy / the putrid slush that waits for them below” (Alighieri VI.10-12). The reader can obviously picture the clean ground beneath all of the disgusting dirt, mold, mud, and rancid slush. Dante also puts the image of the rotting gluttons that lie under this filthy mess into the reader’s mind. Each realm contains something different, and Dante clearly proves to give the sense of a different image every time.

In the 24th canto of Dante’s “Inferno”, we see how Dante depicts forgiveness and the idea keeping an excellent mindset through troubling times by enlisting an epic simile. “The peasants who lack fodder then arise and look about and see the fields all white… go back to the house, walk here and here, pacing, fretting, wondering what to do… I saw my masters eyebrows lower, and my spirits fell and I was sorely vexed”. This quotation compares Virgil to a humble farmer: both are stumped by a seemingly impossible problem to conquer, are both mad that it’s happening and also that no matter what they can’t overcome it. However, both stories continue, “Despair falls from them when they see how the earth’s face has changed in in so little time… he stood and turned on me that sweet and open look”. We see that, like how the farmer is pleased to see that winter has finished so he can feed his herd, Virgil has seen that there is another way down. This simile that shows forgiveness is an important and underlying theme through the entire comedy. Had all of these people repented and asked forgiveness while still in their mortal life then they would have to suffer tar pits or hands bound by snakes. This is also a subliminal message to those that read it that he should no longer be banished from Florence.

Dante is a poet who wrote an epic poem called The Divine Comedy. This epic poem is about Dante’s journey as he goes through 3 levels, which he calls Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise. In the Inferno, he meets Virgil, his guide throughout his voyage. They both pass through the nine circles of Hell, where they witness many different punishments for those who have done awful things in their past. Good versus evil is a major theme that occurred throughout Hell. In the Inferno, there are times where Dante sees good and evil and also represents it himself.

Dante, the pilgrim, shows that he has concern for the condemned in life when he finds himself in the woods and felt horrified. In “The Devine Comedy,” he is shown sojourning through joy and grieves where he passes through Hell where it all begins. According to Dante, Hell had many experiences including sufferings of sinners (Carvalho, Flávio). He expresses his heroism when put forth that notorious human being can choose to learn from Hell. He shows pity and empathy to the sinners in Hell passing through hardships of their own. The experience here of Dante depicts a modern hero as compared to Beowulf. Beowulf is considered an epic hero due to his loyalty to the Germanic code. Loyalty is a sign of obedience in character. However, his symbol of allegiance was felt a call to fame and glory through his accomplishment, not like Dante who sought his acts in an unlikely situation. Dante was first frightened and cautious of the case but was reassured by Virgil’s hope (Carvalho, Flávio).

In the beginning Dante meets three animals – a leopard, a lion and she-wolf, those beasts represent three types of sins. When Dante and Virgil get closer to Lucifer, they can see that he has three heads, also in each mouth he has three greatest sinners in history – Judas, Brutus and Cassius. In the first Canto, Dante tells his story that after he reached the middle of his life journey, he once got lost in the forest and “woke to find myself [Dante] in a dark wood” (Inferno, Canto I, 2). Dante got scared of being alone in the dark until he saw a light.

“My Guide and I crossed over and began to mount that little known and lightless road to ascend into the shinning world again.” The Inferno, by Dante Alighieri, is an epic poem, divine comedy, which was written in the 1500’s in Italian. Dante Alighieri lost his mother at a very young age and was exiled from his hometown, Florence when his group, the White Guelphs got into a disagreement with the Black Guelphs. Dante was a writer and greatly involved in politics which influenced him to write this epic poem. The story starts at with him meeting the ghost of Virgil, his idol, who becomes his guide for the remainder of the book and tries to escort Dante to heaven to be with his love, Beatrice.

In Dante’s Inferno, Dante is taken on a journey through hell. On this journey, Dane sees the many different forms of sins, and each with its own unique contrapasso, or counter-suffering. Each of these punishments reflects the sin of a person, usually offering some ironic way of suffering as a sort of revenge for breaking God’s law. As Dante wrote this work and developed the contrapassos, he allows himself to play God, deciding who is in hell and why they are there. He uses this opportunity to strike at his foes, placing them in the bowels of hell, saying that they have nothing to look forward to but the agony of suffering and the separation from God.

Born in the spring of 1265, Dante Alighieri is one of the most well known poets. He was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. In family of modest means, his mother died when he was seven. Shortly after, his father remarried and had two more children. He is most known for his divine comedy, Inferno, about a man’s journey through hell, purgatory and paradise. Since it is written in Italian vernacular instead of Latin, more people were able to read it and receive its message. He is credited with inventing terza rima, which is a rhyming scheme used in each canto of Inferno. In addition to his divine comedy, Dante wrote pieces on moral philosophy and political thought. In The Divine Comedy, he

In the beginning of his epic, Inferno, Dante seems to have “abandoned the true path” (1.12). He is lost in a dark forest, which symbolizes not only Dante’s loss of morality, but all of humanity’s sins on Earth. The Dark Wood of Error is a foreshadowing of what the afterlife would be like for Dante without God and without any meaning. Dante appears to be suffering through a mid-life crisis as he flirts with the idea of death, saying, “so bitter–death is hardly more severe” (1.7). Dante has lost his dignity and moral direction following his exile from Florence. Dante must travel through Hell and witness the worst crimes ever committed by humans. By traveling through the depths of Satan’s world, Dante is given an opportunity to reconnect with Christianity. Many people claim that Dante journeys through Hell for revenge, but in fact he is hoping to reset his own moral compass and find God.

The inferno by Dante is a story of faith, religious and moral beliefs with various elements, symbols and themes. Through this journey Dante is guided through hell and back by Virgil a symbolism of his teacher and a comrade philosopher like him. The three elements through out this story that seemed to stand out the most are the perfection of God's justice, evil as a contradiction to God's will, and the style of language.

What happens to language in hell? In Dante’s Inferno, the journeying pilgrim explores language’s variations and nuances as he attempts to communicate with hell’s pitiable and sordid inhabitants, despite multiple language barriers and relentless cacophonies. Dante thematically unifies language’s inconsistencies in hell; that is, he associates the pilgrim’s abortive attempts to communicate with particular shades, and the incomprehensible languages and sounds that beleaguer him, with a symbol from Christian mythology: the Tower of Babel. Dante juxtaposes this Christian myth with Virgil’s symbolic association with elevated speech in the Inferno. Virgil functions as the pilgrim’s guide and poetic inspiration,

Religious people always fear that they will not make it to Heaven or the place their God resides. The bible and other religious text give advice on how to avoid the pain of Hell. Dante Alighieri, a famous Italian poet, wrote about the physical description of Hell and the punishments each sinner would receive for their sins. Although The Divine Comedy chronicles Dante's journey from the depths of Hell to the glory of Heaven it contains a deeper meaning. Dante reveals the true meaning of the Inferno through his leading motif, his interactions between the sinners, and the intertwining of other literary works into the Inferno.

Dante was a poet in Italy in the 13th century and the events in Dante's life shape Dante's Inferno. There were political problems in Florence, Italy, and there were two groups, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.