Rhetorical Constructions Of Dante's Inferno

Simol Shah
Dr. Soares
November 3, 2014
HON 171
Hell’s Soul Purpose: Exploring the Rhetorical Constructions of Dante’s Inferno
In his mildly satiric epic poem The Inferno (1317), Dante Alighieri asserts that individuals must learn to reconcile their sympathy and emotional naiveté for the acceptance of suffering and the violence of God's justice. He suggests that pity for sinners clouds an individual's pursuit of stringent moral standards and could make him or her unfit for entrance into Purgatory or Heaven. Dante elicits his argument against the notion of pity through the use of a dual narrative structure to juxtapose two different schools of thought--the compassionate sinner (protagonist) and the omniscient poet (narrator). Dante also illuminates
Dante makes the definition of sin simple: any act that has transgressed nature and its natural practices. Usurers gain from the unnaturally speedy accumulation of money, the lustful engage in sexual practices that cannot possibly yield a child; they are the incarnation of sterility, the incontinent sinners deny their human civility (1.50). Although sin becomes a strong foundation for his comedy, Dante's Inferno, itself one piece of a literary trilogy repeatedly deploys the leitmotif of the number three as a metaphor for ambiguity, compromise, and transition. For example the leopard, lion, and she-wolf that menace Dante in his quest to get to the sunlight all illustrate different types of sin. Interpretations have parsed the leopard as a symbol of fraudulence, the lion as a symbol of pride, and the she-wolf as a symbol of avarice or greed, thus we see three levels of sin: incontinence, violence, and fraudulence—severity dictated by that order. Dante gives the number three allegorical importance in terms of aesthetic pleasure (ie 3 faces of Satan, 3 line poetry): “Oh how amazed I was when I looked up and saw a head—one head wearing three faces” (34.37). The incorporation of this numerical value presents an inverted trinity, his replica of society and the Catholic Church due to beliefs in the holy trinity, but it becomes apparent that Dante stages the entirety of The Divine Comedy as to prove that God’s divine justice is
The very structure of Hell – a series of concentric circles – gives an sense of inescapability, since circles are boundless or have no edges, an individual can only continue tracing their arcs in a futile attempt to find a way out. He describes the entrance to hell like so: “Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood for I had wandered off from the straight path” (1.1). The very imagery portrayed introduces the allegory that Hell is dark, succulent mass astray from the “straight path.” This journey is reciprocated of his exile from Italy. In his journey, he must learn to reject the deceptive promises of the temporal world. These promises are what he deems to be the problems of Italy’s social structure derived from the renaissance era. Promises that justice shall be executed at the expense of the Church, promises that obedience to the Church will ensure one’s reservation in Heaven, promises heeding to allow a state to monopolize the violence within its asserted territory. The use of the allegory explains the means by which he came to cope with his personal calamity of exile and to offer suggestions for the resolution of Italy’s troubles as well. Thus, the exile of an individual becomes a microcosm of the problems of a country, and it also becomes representative of the fall of man. Thus, each sinner in the Inferno embodies his sin just as Dante’s