Resolved in Fiction
Escape to Fantasy
In Shakespeare’s As You Like It and in Dante’s The Divine Comedy, we encounter two distinctly degraded community’s that are respectively situated in the human life and in the afterlife. By examining the process wherein an individual reestablishes a sense of community formation at both the personal and political level, we can gain a more complex understanding of how comedy as a genre employs allegorical spaces in order to rework personal and political circumstances. Through an investigation of the journeys undertaken by Rosalind and the Pilgrim, in these individual works, we see how Shakespeare and Dante provide fictional undertakings that lead these characters on a ...
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system that was widely accepted during that time, people believed they would get what is deservedly theirs, be it good or bad, in the after life, which would settle what happened in the here and now in the afterlife, making everything just. This is crucial to understanding how community is reestablished in Dante’s Divine Comedy. When one reads the Comedy, they must do so with a Christian worldview, as that is how Dante wrote it.
Dante takes us into an imaginary world, his visions of the afterlife, in order to resolve the lack of community the Pilgrim feels. The Pilgrim, at the beginning of his journey, is completely lost, “Midway along the journey of our life / I woke to find myself in a dark wood, / for I had wandered off from the straight path” (Dante 3) However, by the end of his epic journey, the Pilgrim will have ventured through three distinct realms, all three containing within them drastic differences of what a community could be like. During this journey, the Pilgrim will ...
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the violent and fraudulent, are punished much more severely, and rightly so, as they maliciously went against the formation of a community. For example, Ulysses took the trust of his men and betrayed them in order for him to further his agenda, seeking adventure. (Dante 144)
At the second terrace of The Divine Comedy is Purgatory. The difference in between the first and second terrace could not be overstated. In the Inferno, we have a depiction of a giant perverted community, whereas in Purgatory, we have people moving away from sin (isolation) to re-establishing bonds (community) and purging themselves of sins. In order to reestablish community, the souls must work together in order to ...
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"Resolved in Fiction." Essayworld.com. March 14, 2011. Accessed December 21, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Resolved-in-Fiction/96015.
"Resolved in Fiction." Essayworld.com. March 14, 2011. Accessed December 21, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Resolved-in-Fiction/96015.
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