Dante’s Inferno Canto 24 Essay Sample
As Virgil and Dante descend into the 7th pocket of the Eighth Circle of Hell. they arrive at a collapsed span that forces Virgil and Dante to voyage through a steep incline littered with crags and stones. On the manner up the strict terrain. Dante loses his breath. becomes fatigued. and flops to the land. Virgil scolds Dante’s laziness. and urges him forth. saying that a long and steep ascent still awaits him. Once they arrive in the Seventh Pocket. Dante and Virgil come across an arch which forms a broad span across the pocket. Dante moves to the border of the drop. to stare downward into the deep abysm but is unable to see anything. He asks Virgil to take him deeper so that he may understand the sounds he hears coming from beneath. Virgil takes Dante down into the gorge.
Once at that place. Dante witnesses the 7th pocket: The pocket of stealers. Dante tickers as the iniquitous stealers are punished by multitudes snakes that pursuit and assail them. First. they coil like ropes around the custodies and legs of the bare evildoers. adhering them wholly. Once the custodies are bound. another serpent emerges to seize with teeth the edge evildoer on the scruff of his cervix. the evildoer so explodes into fire dissolves into a heap of ash. However. their penalty does non stop at that place. From the ashes. the evildoer re-forms and must digest the same torture once more and once more. Virgil spots one psyche. a Tuscan named Johnny ( Vanni ) Fucci. whom Dante in fact knew back on the surface of Earth. Johnny. reluctantly. state his narrative of how he was placed in the 7th pocket. Johnny explains that he robbed a vestry. and blamed it on another psyche. thereby gaining his Godhead justness in the pocket of stealers.
In Canto 24. Dante introduces the political adversary. Johnny Fucci. who’s peculiar offense was stealing Ag decorations from the vestry of Pistoia. merely to put the incrimination on person else. Johnny Fucci was the bogus boy of Fuccio de’ Lazzari. and a hawkish leader of the Blacks in Pistoia. His opprobrium as a adult male of fury was widespread. Around 1923. the exchequer of San Iacopo in the church of San Zeno at Pistoia was robbed. The individual was unjustly accused of the larceny was Rampino Fresi. Later. the truth was discovered about Vanni’s workss. and one of his plotters named Vain Della Mona. was sentenced to decease ( Musa 296 ) . We meet Johnny Fucci in the concluding stage of the canto. as Dante one time more follows the repeating subject throughout Inferno of transitioning from myth to history. However. psychologically and linguistically. canto 24 nowadayss a complete contrast to the beginning cantos.
Where the damned and frustrated evildoer both submits to and net incomes from their brush with Virgil and Dante. Johnny Fucci sets himself in violent resistance to that order ( Kirkpatrick 405 ) . Most of the sunglassess whom Dante and Virgil have encountered have been 1s who still cleaving to. or have some connexion to. the outside surface of Earth. Despite this. Johnny Fucci wishes to wipe out the memory of his life from the Earth’s surface. and even expresses his choler of Dante and Virgil witnessing his penalty openly. In topographic point of the delicate reciprocations of emotion and conversation between Dante. Virgil. and other sunglassess of Hell. in Canto 24 we find a kind of malicious finding to “steal” from Dante any pleasance he may take at the sight of wickedness so rightly meeting the due order of its penalty. Johnny Fucci rejoices in being ill-mannered and barbaric- suggested by his brutal. rhythmically disrupted words.
His deliberate finding non to be involved with others. and the penalty he suffers ( which is invariably to hold his exclusive ownership of signifier reduced to ashes ) parodies the productive alteration that Virgil. Dante and the authoritative evildoers of snake pit are all portion of ( Kirkpatrick 406 ) . Johnny Fucci is compelled by the poets to reply truthfully. as he utters his prognostication to Dante as many sunglassess before him have explained. However. Johnny suddenly ends his prognostication. with the malicious add-on of intentionally wishing that his prognostication may bring down heartache upon Dante: “I Tell you this. I hope it hurts” ( 151 ) .
As Dante observes the penalty that Johnny is subjected to. he instantly references a fabulous animal known as a Phoenix: “Compare: the Phoenix ( as the sages say ) will come to its 500th twelvemonth. so dice. but so. on its ain pyre. be born anew” ( 106 ) . Dante scholar Robin Kirkpatrick states that Dante’s reference and description draws straight on Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso’s Metamorphoses. as the Pheonix is a familiar mediaeval figure for the Resurrection- in which. harmonizing to Christian beliefs. worlds are eventually assured ageless ownership of their ain physical individualities. The penalty of this canto. in this sense. is an irony underlying all the metabolisms of signifier that are suffered by Johnny and the stealers of the 7th pocket.
Their penalty. is a mirror image of that ultimate transmutation. yet they are to see it for an infinity. with no hope of of all time having the true ageless life. Of the contrapasso. the custodies of stealers are the causes of their offenses ; therefore they are bound everlastingly ( Kirkpatrick 406 ) . And as the stealer destroys his victims individuality by doing their substance disappear. so is he distressingly destroyed and made to vanish. over and over once more.
One of the most noteworthy facets of this canto. nevertheless. is the big simile which opens canto 24. Dante uses the simile to exemplify the alterations of looks of Virgil’s face. He invokes the weathering alterations that occur on a winter twenty-four hours as hoar prevents a adult male from his work. on which his endurance depends on so. as the Sun appears. allows him to eventually travel to work with his flock of lambs. Dante uses this simile to mirror the looks of Virgil’s face in old cantos: foremost. Virgil’s frigid disapproval of the prevarications of the Satans of hell’s Gatess ; so a more encouraging look which he foremost showed to Dante during their first brush in canto 1. The simile spans an extended 15 lines. and its rhetorical degree is highly elevated. The simile is besides pastoral in tone. non merely concentrating on the day-to-day regiment of the “poor turf. ” but besides mentioning to the interior fluctuations and displacements of uncertainty and anxiousness between Dante and Virgil ( 11 ) .
As in other Cantos. we find Dante fighting one time more physically. and spiritually in the deepnesss of snake pit towards the beginning of canto 24. Virgil must help him up the steep pinnacle taking to the 7th pocket. Dante describes his wretchedness in the canto ; “My lungs by now had so been milked of breath that. come so far. I couldn’t do it further. I flopped. in fact. when we arrived. merely there” ( 45-46 ) . after which he is instantly scolded by his usher. Virgil. for resting on the land. This can be seen as a direct correlativity between Dante’s weak psyche and organic structure during his experiences and tests in snake pit. Virgil reproaches Dante. stating him that “There’s yet a longer ladder you must scale. You can’t merely bend and leave all these behind” ( 55-56 ) . Virgil’s reference of the “longer ladder” may touch to the huge mountain of purgatory which Dante has still yet to brush. nevertheless. Virgil may really good be mentioning to Dante’s mental and religious strength as they have non yet witnessed the worst that snake pit has yet to offer ( 55 ) . If Dante is unable to manage what he has encountered so far. he has no pick but to go stronger and imperativeness on as he is told by Virgil that he merely “cant merely bend and leave all these behind. ” he can merely travel frontward ( 55 ) .
