The Fate of the Gluttons

As Dante recovers from swoon, he awakes to find himself in the Third Circle of Hell, the home of the damned souls whom committed the sin to find no higher use of God's gifts than to indulge and wallow in food and drink. In this circle, Dante uses extremely detailed language and descriptive imagery to fit the punishment and setting to agree with the law on contrapasso. As the poets enter the Third Circle, Dante immediately dives right into description of the lay of the land, explaining that ”a great storm of putrefaction falls incessantly, a mixture of stinking snow and freezing rain, which forms into a vile slush underfoot.". Immediately, the reader gets a sense of cold, discomfort, and the smell of purification. Such descriptive words used by Dante in the quote above really gives insight to the situation and allows the reader to already make connections between the punishment of the sinners and the law of contrapasso in the sense that Gluttons, always being warm and content due to indulgence in food and drink, are now subjected to their worst nightmare. The nightmare of freezing cold and decaying garbage, which they produced all their life. However, Dante also explains that, " The souls of the damned lie in the icy paste, swollen and obscene, and Cerberus, the ravenous three-headed dog of Hell, stands guard over them, ripping and tearing them with his claws and teeth.". This is really where Dante makes the connection of the soul’s punishment fitting perfectly to the law of contrapasso. Analyzation of these disturbing and graphic scene yields that the Gluttons have become, in a sense, food. Receiving the complete opposite of their lifestyle on Earth, a lifestyle of warmth, comfort, pleasant smells, and eating has now been transformed into a life of ice, putrid smells, discomfort, pain, and becoming the food. Using very descriptive, in-depth writing, Dante was able to perfectly convey and assert the sense of how the punishment of the Gluttons fits into the law of contrapasso.