Figurative Language In Dante's Inferno

What comes after death is an anxiety that plagues all of humanity. To know what lies beyond the grave, yet doomed never to know places a lot of stress on every individual, and all views of what may come next are different. Thus, one may view Dante’s Inferno to be a sort of philosophy on the afterlife or at least a theory based on the bible. Dante was a devout Catholic, as were most Italians in his time, so among all who were literate and amongst those with the privilege to understand his work, Inferno was a fantastical glimpse into the afterlife, at least for the sinners. While not taken seriously by most today, back in Dante’s day when the Bible had such a grip over Western thought, Inferno was seen as a very realistic depiction of what the

Dante’s introduction to Hell begins with the gate outside, which inscribes itself as “the way into eternal grief… the way to a forsaken race” (2-3). This arranges Hell as never-ending sorrow for those who have abandoned the morals of the Bible, effectively setting a tone of suffering, at least for those who deserve it. The gate's inscription closes with the menacing statement: “Abandon every hope, all you who enter” (9). The antonym to hope is despair, so abandoning every hope is quite literally the inscriber (presumably God) telling all who enter to fall to despair, for there is no hope to hold on to here. After Dante passes the gate, the reader immediately feels through Dante’s senses the despair and misery that run so rampant in Hell, with mentions of “sighs and cries and shrieks of lamentation [that] echoed throughout the starless air of Hell” (22-23). Living vicariously through Dante’s point of view, the reader can feel the profound sense of suffering just by imagining the volley of agonizing pain. Such sense imagery would be enough to make anyone shudder. Dante himself expressed the fact these sounds made him cry. He goes on about these screams, referencing them as “strained in anguish with cadences of anger” (25-26). The use of “anguish” and “anger” specifically carry the tone of what Hell is about, filling the air with a sense of malaise. There’s also