Research Paper On Dante's Inferno

Domonique Hessing
English 2403 54*
2016 October 21
Inferno
Dante's journey through hell was a lesson well learned. Dante's setup of hell gave us, the readers, a great imaginary insight on how Dante structured hell according to the sinner's sins. In this poem, we can see how if a sin is committed, your punishment fits your crime. We can also see the way that society was viewed in Dante's eyes. The society as a whole was strict, everything going against God was a sin, The structure of how hell was setup can be seen as a relation to the person's sin as well as how the sin was viewed in society and how the people reacted to their punishments. Inferno was written to justify the beliefs that god had, not on human happiness or what people thought
If you can not respect yourself or the people that love you then you are committing a sin. Dante shows that he believes that suicide is one of the worst sins a person can commit. How can someone be so selfish to themselves? When he reaches the seventh circles he hears the cries of the souls but he can not find out where they are coming from. "Around me wails of grief were echoing, and I saw no one there to make those sounds;….." (187). This is a great contrapasso because these sinners are turned into tree where if someone breaks off their branches or eat their leaves, it causes them great pain and they bleed. Their punishment is basically showing the pain that they caused on themselves and others over and over. This punishments shows that Dante wants people to understand what they did and to pay for what they did and by doing so, he is punishing them with what they did to themselves. As a reader, these punishments sounds harsh because to put someone through so much agony over something that seems harmless to others would be a sin to me, but to Dante he feels that these sinners are getting what they deserve. When you look at the poem as a whole, it then starts to make sense why these people are being punished, it is to create balance. Sinner needs a proper punishment to fit their sins. In other words, Dante is saying that if you are going to commit a crime then you
If you commit a sin, your punishment should fit the crime. In Canto XX, Dante reaches the fourth bolgia and here lies the souls of sinner who tried to learn of the future, which only God can do. Dante shows great use of contrapasso for this punishment. These souls were determined to see the future and because of that, there head will be turned backwards, where their hair is infront of them and their tears fall on their buttock. Actions speak louder than words. Creating this punishments shows that by constantly trying to see the future then you will forever see the future and never the present and you will never know what is happening in the present. "….their faces looked down on their backs; they had to move ahead by moving backward, for they never saw what was ahead of them."