Dante's "Inferno"

Paper Summary:

This paper details two cantos from the tale of Dante's "Inferno" and attempts to derive how accomplished a writer Dante actually was because of his use of imagination and reality through a review of Cantos Five and Thirteen. It assesses Dante's skill in telling his story by tying together his vivid imagination with his ability to describe people realistically. It shows how, in Dante's hell, the sins of the individual souls describe both how the individuals lived their lives before death and how they will spend eternity after death and how Dante's imagination mixed with reality made his tormented characters believable and opened a window into their lives.

From the Paper:

"Dante had a definite interplay between reality and imagination. For example, one would think that with the many tortures and the constant torment, these levels of hell would reek horrendously. Although not from either Canto five or thirteen, this example demonstrates how the author combined real and imagined to describe the smell of hell and his imagination makes it very real. "Dante arrives at the verge of a rocky precipice which encloses the seventh circle, where he sees the sepulcher of Anastasius the heretic; behind the lid of which pausing a little, to make himself capable by degrees of enduring the fetid smell that steamed upward from the abyss, he is instructed by Virgil concerning the manner in which the three following circles are disposed, and what description of sinners is punished in each." (DANTE) Dante captures the stench precisely."

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