Examples Of Contrapasso In Dante's Inferno

Dante’s Inferno depicts the writer himself traveling through the afterlife with his guide Virgil, and details all the aspects of hell as Dante descends towards the ninth circle. Throughout his journey, he witnesses souls in every circle of hell for the sins they committed in their lifetime, each suffering punishments different based on the specific circle they reside. Not only are the punishments different, but they tend to be perfectly suited to the sin that has been committed, a concept called “Contrapasso”. Contrapasso essentially translates to “the punishment fits the crime,” and this notion permeates throughout Dante’s poem as he describes to the reader how the numerous souls in hell are all uniquely experiencing retribution for their

The fourth circle of hell exemplifies this aspect of Contrapasso, where the hoarders and spenders “rolled enormous weights,” that eventually “clashed against each other.” (Musa 130) While locked in a perpetual “semicircle joust,” the sinners here become unrecognizable, as “‘their undistinguished life that made them foul now makes it harder to distinguish them’” (Musa 131). The punishment of the sin of greed instantly brings to life the two extremes of the sin, where one keeps money and never lets go, and the other spends it at ridiculous rates. The opposition of the hoarders and spenders depicts the sin of greed as being multifaceted, where both extremes are two sides of the same coin. As a result of this forced opposition in hell, all souls physically lose the features that make them a person. The contrapasso here is that people who get so attached to money lose their individuality, fighting against others who did the same, eventually becoming a fight between two “teams,” whose only goal is to deepen their pockets. Greed is characterized as a metaphorical thief who robs people of their individuality, and similar to lust, the semicircular motion of the hoarders and the spenders paints greed as a sin that beguiles people into a cycle of constant chase after money. This same kind of opposition characterizes the sin of fraud, specifically in relation to the panderers and

Dante’s experience in the fourth bolgia in the eighth circle highlights this aspect of contrapasso. As he and Virgil make their way through the circle, they witness souls who were “silent, weeping, walking at a litany pace,” whose bodies were “incredibly distorted, the chin was not above the chest, the neck was twisted-their faces looked down on their backs; they had to move ahead by moving backward, for they never saw what was ahead of them” (Musa 251). In this area of the eighth circle, the souls who have committed fraud in the form of sorcery and witchcraft are physically altered in a way that does not allow these souls to see ahead of them. The irony that these people who claim they could see into the future while alive are now unable to see what is directly in front of their path reflects this ditch’s contrapasso. By altering their physical “body,” this contrapasso characterizes the souls in this layer of hell as monstrosities who strayed from the path of god, and tried to harness the power of fate to their own benefit. The physical change in appearance aids the reader in distinguishing these souls from others in different layers based on how each contrapasso places a different physical limitation on the soul. For example, in the sixth bolgia, Dante and Virgil observe souls wearing “dazzling, gilded cloaks outside, but inside they were lined with lead” (Musa