Offer a critical analysis of Dante's Inferno.

The idea of literature representing unity and symmetry is present in Dante's Divine Comedy. Dante is unabashed in rejecting fragmentation and disunity in the name of an ordered configuration to being in the world. Dante is admittedly in the midst of a "dark wood" as his journey starts. His embrace of both Virgil as his guide and the power of Christian redemption enables Dante, the pilgrim and author, to find a sense of unity and symmetry in being. The vision of paradise as one where all opposites are merged is critical in such a construction.
Dante's vision of unity is significant on a couple of levels. The first is that it is challenging to find a more comic text. While it is not very difficult to find tragedies littering the literary landscape, it is a bit more of a struggle to find a work that is more emphatic of a comic condition to being than Dante's Divine Comedy. In outlining the different aspects of being, Dante suggests that individuals can find a sense of unity in being if they identify with something larger than themselves. By the end of his journey, Dante is no longer dispirited and isolated pilgrim. Rather, he has found purpose and meaning in the world of the divine, embodied by Beatrice. The fusion of all opposing notions of the good and embrace of totality is significant. Few other works are so emphatic and passionate in their embrace of the unity that is found in The Divine Comedy.
The embrace of spirituality is matched by the embrace of intertextuality. Dante is deliberate in having Virgil as his guide. Through this, Dante embraces the idea that works of literature are interrelated and connected to one another. Dante's inclusion of works like Homer helps to further this connection. In Dante's world, unity is present when the individual artist recognizes the sequence in which they are a part. Literature is an endeavor where one is not in isolation. There is interconnection and interrelated condition within literature that Dante embraces in his work. This is further reflection of the essence of comedy intrinsic to Dante's work.