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Hostility In Dantes Inferno

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Hostility or Compassion?
Dante Alighieri, was exiled from Florence, Italy, because of politics, after he was exiled he wrote an epic about his view of Hell. In the epic, The Inferno, Dante, the protagonist, strays from the right path, so Virgil, his guide takes him through Hell to show him that he needs to get back on the path of God. However during the epic, Alighieri shows compassion and hostility to certain sinners through his protagonists actions, diction and extra punishments. Such sinners he felt compassion or hostility to are Filippo Argenti, Ser Brunetto Latino, and Bocca Degli Abbati.
Alighieri shows hostility towards Filippo Argenti, a wrathful sinner, through his diction, and by making his protagonist add an extra punishment to …show more content…

When Dante enters where the Treacherous to Country are he accidentally or willfully kicks, “As we approached the center of all weight, where I went shivering in eternal shade, whether it was my will, or chance, or fate, I cannot say, but as I trailed my guide among those heads, my foot struck violently against the face of one” (XXXII, 73-78). By having Dante kick Bocca in the head, Alighieri conveys that he feels hostile against him. Even though Alighieri writes “whether it was my will, or chance, or fate”, the fact that he writes his protagonist to kick Bocca, shows his hatred. After Dante kicks him, Bocca asks who he is and Dante then has a hand on his hair while he answers. Bocca then doesn’t reveal who he is, so Dante states, “I grabbed the hair of his dog’s-ruff and said: ‘Either you tell me who you truly are, or you won’t have a hair left on your head’... I had a good grip on his hair; already I had yanked out more than a fistful of it, while the wretch yelped” (XXXII, 97-99, 103-105). Alighieri writes Dante to rip his hair out, which causes Bocca pain, which demonstrates how Alighieri wants Bocca to feel pain and be punished for being a traitor to their country, Florence, Italy. Alighieri's diction also applies that he has hatred to Bocca, by stating that his hair is like a “dog’s-ruff” conveys that Alighieri is being disrespectful by calling him a dog, and

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