Dante suggests that the implication of pity in the Inferno is due to the sinner’s apathy for self pity. After talking to Francesca in the second circle of hell, he faints from being overcome by pity. Dante was unable to form a barrier between himself and the sinner, as each sinner tries to create pity for themselves as a result of their torture.
Pity and Indignation in Hell. Pity plays a huge role in Dante's Inferno.
Those in hell feel sadness, and this sadness, being an ordinary human emotion, is expected to result in the ordinary human response of pity from those who observe, but cannot share the sorrow. The reason for the infernal leg of Dante’s pilgrimage is to restore his awareness of the reality of sin as an objective reality.
When Virgil tells Dante to ignore del Bello, Dante shows a surprising amount of resolve. Fear and Pity in the Inferno: Challenging God’s Judgment Anonymous College In the Inferno, Dante responds to the sinners’ torments with fear and compassion.
In fact, it’s his relative – Geri del Bello – for whom Dante had wept a few lines ago, not for the sowers of scandal at large.
In Canto V, Dante swoons with pity for … It is the key emotion that Dante confronts during his passage through hell. And all the while one spirit uttered this, The other one did weep so, that, for pity, I swooned away as if I had been dying, And fell, even as a dead body falls. (Inferno, Canto V, 139-143)1.
For instance, when Dante sees Brunetto Latini among the Sodomites in Canto XV, Dante the character feels deeply moved and treats his patron kindly and with compassion. Nonetheless, even though Dante's poem presents the punishments of hell as deserved, Dante himself cannot help but feel great pity for many of the souls trapped there. Dante, more convincingly than most moralists and theologians, shows that this line is a very fine one indeed, and he acknowledges the potential complicity (his own included) of those who promulgate ideas and images of romantic love through their creative work. Although, the two tales Francesca and Ugolino are figuratively different, they do share common apathy for pity.
It is a dramatic moment.
These wretched souls play off of the reader or audience’s emotion for their tormented nature. At the unexpected information that one of his own kin inhabits Hell, Dante predictably reacts with pity.
However, his encounter with Francesca shows that the lack of self-pity of the sinners is the reason for Dante’s pity in the Inferno.
But outside the poem, Dante the poet has chosen to condemn his former patron to damnation; by placing him among the Sodomites, he implies that Latini was homosexual, a vicious slur in fourteenth-century Italy. Here, in the circle of the carnal sinners, Dante first feels pity in Hell. Compassion comes from the Latin root meaning “to suffer with” and Dante often engages in the sinners’ suffering.