Sean McDaniel
1/16/08
Dilemma of Existance
Dante's Inferno
Dante's Inferno is a very insightful and thought provoking book. The journey of Dante through hell makes you ponder your own hell and the punishments you would enact on people that do bad things. The following is my reaction to Dante's Inferno and how it affected me personally.
This book held people that betrayed others in the lowest levels of hell. I agree fully with this. My reasoning behind this is that if someone trusts you, then betrays you, they should receive the worst punishment possible for breaking your trust and screwing you over. When Dante is in the 9th circle of hell he was questioning a sinner. The sinner said, "But Minos, the infallible, had me hurled here to the final bolgia of the ten for the alchemy I practiced in the world" (246). This made me think because the people that affect more people were punished the worst.
An instance that mad me think was the various punishments that people had to endure. I found the tree punishment to be very interesting. The book says, "The Harpies, feeding on it's leaves then, give it pain and pain's outlet simultaneously" (122). This just seems like a punishment that's not a punishment especially for people that are in hell for violence. This kind of sheds some light into the authors intents on depicting hell as a place where people that screw multiple people over in a "wave effect", are punished more severely. Another punishment that I found ingenious was that of the gluttons. The conditions were described as, "Here to all time with neither pause nor change the frozen rain of Hell descends in torrents" (66). The gluttons were forced to crawl around in the cold rain and mud...
A College Essay?
I do hope not. First of all, this is the only discussion of Dante's Inferno I have ever come across that begins at the end and works backward. It is not an improvement on a forward-looking discussion. Further, the discussion is so remarkably dry and dead that it suggests that the author immersed himself in some packaged set of notes just long enough to sketch out a paper, rather than giving the Divine Comedy the careful reading that it merits. The author handles the material with a clumsiness suggestion that he has failed to grasp many of the key points even in the scenes that he invokes. (I find it hard to believe that this is a B+ college-level paper. It reads more like something I would expect from someone no farther along that sophomore year of high school.
And then there are the expressions that suggest this is a talk that someone would give over lunch in the cafeteria.
"screwing you over."
"An instance that mad me think was the various punishments"
"the authors intents" [At this point, the demon of the apostrophe should begin to flay this miscreant.]
"people that screw multiple people over in a 'wave effect'," Oh, poor soul: people being animate requires "who" rather than "that"; "screw" is slang, at best, which is not appropriate to an academic essay; the comma goes inside the quotation marks; and 'wave effect' is a colloquialism that is meaningless in this context.
"Dante's Inferno was a fun and
intellectually stimulations book." Lord, forgive him for he knows not. "The Inferno" has been described as many things, but this may be a first, that it is a stimulations book. I am not entirely certain what a "stimulations book" is, but it certainly sounds prurient.
"PENGUINE" It seems that the author was unable to copy the word correctly.
In short, I think this essay should be condemned at least to Purgatory, probably for all of eternity.
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