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Dante's Inferno Passage Analysis

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Dante and Virgil enters the Hell where they are confronted with cries and torments from everywhere. These cries are from souls who did not commit to either good or evil but lived their lives without making any conscious moral choices. Throughout the passage Dante shows how deeply the souls are affected in the Hell. These souls are taunted here as Dante opens the passage saying how they are unfortunate because they never did anything good or bad but they are still part of the Hell. They are here because they did not make any conscious choices. This passage gives very vivid descriptions about how the souls are tortured to give the readers an idea about how goring Hell is and how exactly some souls are punished because of their actions. The Gate of Hell is where everything begins and as Dante goes through each circle, he experiences more taunting from different souls. The following lines continue to give more details about the torments as wasps and hornets continually bite them and they had nowhere to run. This is their home now and they can’t escape from here. The tone of the passage is descriptive because Dante wants his audience to feel the pain for these …show more content…

The purpose of this passage is to prepare Dante and the audience to for what is coming in the upcoming circles. As the circles progress, the tortures become more gruesome. Dante uses metaphor such as “pus and tears that dribbled to their feet” to make the audience feel the tortures and how painful they were. The structure of Dante’s Inferno is unique as the first and third lines of each stanza rhymes and the middle line has a different end sound. His use of this pattern indicates connections among the story because it creates a feeling of forward motion. There are three lines in each stanza which symbolizes the holy trinity since the number three is a crucial factor in Dante’s

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