Hell In Dante's Inferno

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Imagine waking up one day and finding yourself in hell. What do you picture hell looks like? Who is there and why are you there? Dante Alighieri answers these questions from his own perspective in the Inferno translated by Allen Mandelbaum. Hell is a controversial subject with many different ways to consider what hell is and who deserves to go there. Different religions have different ideals when it comes to explaining what hell is, if they even acknowledge one, and how you end up there. Inferno is just an interpretation by Dante to show how he views hell from how it looks and who, from his time, would be there. If the it were to be updated today, there are, unfortunately, many more different choices to pick from to add to his Divine Comedy. …show more content…

(Alighieri 104-11). We can all think of at least one “famous” serial killer from the past 100 years; in fact, there have been far too many. Jeffery Dahmer would be one of those serial killers who, very quickly after execution, found themselves in hell. Honestly, he is the type that showed absolutely no remorse for his actions and he actually falls into many different categories of Dante’s hell, however, those other sins wouldn’t place him low enough in the circles. Dahmer didn’t just kill people to kill them. He enjoyed it. He did various different things with the bodies of his victims such as experimenting with them in attempt to make them into “zombies”, kept body parts as memorabilia and even so far as to eat the hearts of some of his victims. Along with murder, he was ultimately charged with dismemberment, cannibalism, rape and necrophilia (Crime Museum). If I were editing Dante’s work today, I would move murders to the lowest circle of hell instead of the traitor’s. He is a terrible human being who showed no remorse to irreversible crimes he had committed and his sin stretches further out than just violence. Judging by his crimes he could also fall into the First Circle with lust, Fifth Circle with anger, also in the Seventh Circle with the sodomites, and in various other sins found in the Eighth Circle. The punishment for murders in the Seventh Circle is float in a stream of boiling blood (Alighieri 107). I don’t find this as fitting as I do as the punishment in the lowest level of hell. The devil himself chews on the sinners. I feel this would be more appropriate as Dahmer is also guilty of

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