Who Is Virgil Characterize Dante's Inferno

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The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, is Dante’s journey through hell, purgatory and paradise to find his path back to God. In the middle of his life Dante realizes “the direct way was lost,” this characterization reflects Dante's unwillingness to take responsibility for straying off the moral path and getting lost in the dark. In an effort to rehabilitate him the poet Virgil is sent to guide Dante through the nine circles of hell, where together they witness people being punished for the sins they committed on earth. The sins humankind commits are divided into three groups: incontinence or lacking self-control, violence and fraud. Dante places the Neutrals, the people who couldn’t commit to either good or evil in life, at the very beginning of Inferno, a place he calls Ante-hell, located by the gates of hell. The Neutrals whose sins were refusing to commit themselves to either good or evil by staying impartial is significant to their geographical position in Inferno. Virgil, the poet who wrote aeneid, was sent to guide…show more content…
The Ante-hell is necessary because the people condemned to be there are in limbo, because they don’t deserve to be in either hell or paradise. They didn’t intentionally choose sinful or moral conduct, they were indifferent and didn’t choose either. “They have no hope in death, and their blind life is so base that they are envious of every other fate (The Divine Comedy, page 57).” These sinners have nothing left to fear or aspire to that they are envious of every other fate. The passageway of hell is the appropriate spot for those people who refused to take a stand of any kind be it good or evil. The Neutrals’ punishment is to be constantly suspended from action because people who inhabit hell's entrance are the undetermined of the world that were indecisive throughout
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