The Divine Comedy

Please answer the following questions. For time's sake, you do not need to write in coherent paragraphs or even whole sentences but you must jot down your ideas.

Think about these questions as you read:

1. What do the three "danteworlds"--hell, purgatory, and paradise--mean to you? How do you envision them? How do you think they might relate to one another and to the world(s) in which we live?
 
2. Dante literally faces a mid-life crisis. What problems or issues do you associate with such an event? Can you think of any recent representations--in movies, books, the news, and so on--of some sort of mid-life crisis?  

3. How do we define “sin”? Do we agree or disagree with Dante’s conception of “sin” and its punishment as contrapasso: the sin equals the punishment, so that sinning is its own hell as it destroys the very life of the sinner?  What is our own idea of “punishment”?  Salvation?

Inferno

Canto 1

1. Why does Dante begin with the collective “we” at the beginning of the work? 

2. Describe the spiritual state and time of life that the narrator is in when the canto begins. To help do this, where is he -- how do you interpret the natural setting in the first 30 or so lines? The "dark wood," the "hill," and the path, the rays of light? What do the leopard, lion, and wolf represent?

3. Why does Dante choose Virgil to guide the narrator?

Canto 4

1. Around line 90 or so, the narrator is introduced to his predecessor poets: Homer, Ovid, Horace, and Lucan. Virgil is already his guide, so Dante is the sixth among the greats. The narrator says that they all talked amongst one another -- why do you suppose he doesn't tell us what they said? What seems to be his attitude towards Classical literature and the pagan (pre-Christian) past here?

2. How do you explain the presence of non-Christians in Limbo (Saladin, Avicenna, Averroes)?

Canto 5

1. How is the punishment of the lustful another instance of God's "poetic justice" rather than just a strict, dull "eye-for-an-eye" kind of punishment? What is the logical relationship between the vice of lust and its punishment in Dante's hell?

2. When he meets the lovers Paolo and Francesca, the narrator is obviously filled with compassion for them. Why do you suppose that's the case? Also, is being compassionate the same thing as taking their side? Why or why not?

3. What is the narrator interested in learning from Paolo and Francesca? When Francesca tells their story towards the canto's end, why does she keep it brief rather than expanding on it to satisfy the narrator's interest?

4. At the end of Inferno 5, Francesca blames a book (and its author) for her adultery. Dante (Pilgrim) faints after her speech. Does he faint in sympathy for her suffering? Out of some sense of responsibility as an author of the type of amatory poetry whose vocabulary she has assimilated? Out of horror that one's text can be so disastrously misread? (Surely Dante's "point" in writing such poetry himself was not to encourage this type of behavior.) Is the canto as a whole suggesting something about reading? You'd need to know the 13th-century prose "Vulgate Cycle" of the Arthurian story to unravel Francesca's assertions, but in the book she and Paolo were reading, a) it was Guinevere, not Lancelot, who took the initiative and kissed the other first, and b) if they had read farther in it that day, they'd have seen that the love affair led to civil war, the destruction of Camelot, and that both lovers in remorse entered religious houses where they lived out their days.

5. From Dante's presentation of Francesca and Paolo, we are encouraged to consider the place of moral responsibility in depictions of love, sex, and violence in our own day. We can certainly discuss music, television, movies, and advertising (as well as literature) in these terms. Who is more (or less) responsible and therefore accountable for unacceptable attitudes and behavior in society: the creators and vehicles of such messages or the consumers and audiences?

Canto 10

1. How does Farinata behave in this canto, and how does Dante treat him in return? How would you characterize Farinata's relationship to his eternal "tomb-mate," Cavalcante? His relationship to Dante and Dante's ancestors? How does Dante react to him? How does Farinata's discussion of the souls' knowledge of the present and future place limits on those in Hell?

2. Why is the heretics' form of punishment fitting? What is the nature of any heretic's offense, and how is that offense reflected in the punishment of being partially or entirely entombed in a burning receptacle?

Canto 28

1. Why is Mohammed condemned to hell? How does his punishment fit his sin?

Canto 34

1. What is the symbolic significance of Cocytus, the frozen lake of ice at the bottom of hell? Is it surprising for the reader to discover that the bottom of hell is frozen solid? What does the cold symbolize?  

2. How does Dante's presentation of Satan render the archfiend absurd? Why is it necessary to do that, rather than make him seem grand and awe-inspiring?

3. Satan is immobilized in ice and chomps eternally on Brutus and Cassius (Julius Caesar's murderers) and Christ's betrayer Judas Iscariot. How might Satan's predicament be Dante's ultimate comment on the consequences of human sinfulness?

4. What is the significance of the change in perspective that Virgil and Dante go through when they traverse Satan's body and find that the way down has become the way up? How might this change in perspective amount to a comment on the necessary path to salvation?

Paradiso

Canto 33 

1. In this last canto, Dante seems to Christianize the idea from Plato's Cave analogy of a "Sun" beyond our earthly sun, as symbol of the Good, the source of Being, which is simultaneously the origin and the goal of things, as well as the principle by which things can be known. This is a canto dominated by gradations of light. Why? How does Dante give expression to this final vision? Why does he emphasize the need to tell it, that is the literary act of writing?

General Considerations:  

1. Dante is a pilgrim is several ways. What are they? What is the role of Virgil and Beatrice? Consider the ways in which you may read the poem on different levels. How would you characterize the structure of the poem (bearing in mind the difference between Dante the Poet and Dante the Pilgrim)?    

2. Dante often puts people in hell for a concrete, visible sin (such as adultery in Francesca's case), but that concrete, outward sin is really just a symptom of a greater, deeper sin within the sinner's character.  The outward sin is almost only a pretext for putting the sinner in hell.  The deeper sin is what makes them truly evil and is the real reason for their being damned. Remember, they are placed in Hell because they are evil, so can we believe their own justifications?  In the selections we have read, how does this play out?  

3. Not only is Dante portrayed as a pilgrim but also as Dante the poet. In light of this, consider these literary aspects of the work. Why and how does he make use of them? Give one example from the poem for each:  

a. Addresses to the reader:  

b. Rhetorical devices (allegory, analogy, metaphor, simile, ineffability topos [speechlessness]):  

c. Incorporation of the senses (smell, touch, sight, hearing):  

d. Use of lightness and darkness