Social commentary similarities in Don Quixote and Inferno as well as style departures are compared and contrasted in this paper containing five pages. There are three bibliographic sources cited.
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most bygone forms of government had extreme powers of censure, writers had to, therefore, be quite prudent about the way in which they openly criticized those in power. Cervante, in
his work, Don Quixote, chose to use humor as an indirect commentary on life in his times, whereas Dante chose the more direct route, implicating and satirizing those whom had
already exiled him from his homeland. From Dantes perspective, they had already exiled him, so the political situation and those in power, were fair game. Inferno is really a
wide-scale analysis of the political chaos and corruption in his native homeland of Florence, Italy. He manages to directly implicate those in power in several ways. Firstly, he gets right
to the point by placing nearly all of those political figures from his estranged homeland in his version of Hell. There, in Hell, those politicians are forced to endure punishments
befitting the crime. And, he determines to make his tale slightly prophetic in nature as he sets it several years before his exile so as to make the events which
did actually happen seem as if they had been foretold. In fact, the voices of the damned foretell most of the upheaval which had already come to pass by the
time Dante wrote his Inferno. He implies that all have sinned in one way or another by his use of the generic we, so that the reader might imagine him/herself
a traveler with Dante on this journey. "Midway on our lifes journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost" (Dante, Canto I, li.1-2). Also,
Dante manages to make the suggestion about the separation of Church and State. In fact, this is particularly illustrated with the last section of the Inferno, where the devil (Lucifer)