Essay on Morality in Dante’s Inferno, Hamlet, The Trial, and Joyce’s Th

Changing Morality in Dantes Inferno, Hamlet, The Trial, and Joyces The Dead Everyone remembers the nasty villains that terrorize the happy people in world-beater tales. Indeed, many of these fairy tales be defined by their clearly defined good and bad archetypes, using clichd physical stereotypes. What is noteworthy is that these fairy tales are predominately either old themselves or based on stories of antiquity. Modern stories and epics do not offer these clear definitions they force the reader to continually redefine the definitions of holiness to the hero that is not fully good and the villain that is not so despicable. From Dantes Inferno, through with(predicate) the winding mental visions in Shakespeares Hamlet, spiraling through the labyrinth in Kafkas The Trial, and culminating in Joyces abstract realization of morality in The Dead, authors grapple with this development. In the literary progression to the modern world, the increase abstraction of evil from its classic archetype to a foreign, supernatural entity without bounds or cure is untroubledly suggestive of the pugnacious assault on individualism in the face of literatures dualistic, thematically oligopolistic heritage. In analyzing this gradient of morality, it is useful first to examine a work from early literature whose strong purity of morality is unwavering for the purposes of this discussion, Dantes Inferno provides this model. It is fairly straightforward to discover Dantes dualistic construction of morality in his winding caverns of funny farm each stern, finite circle of Hell is associated with a clear sin that is both definable and directly punishable. As Dante moves downwards in this moral machination, he notes that Like lies with like in every h... ...akespearean Criticism. Ed. Laurie Lanzen Harris. Vol. 1. Detroit Gale research Company, 1984. 234-7. Fort, Keith. The Function of Style in Franz Kafkas The Trial. Sewanee Review 72 (1964) 643-51. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century L iterary Criticism. Ed. Dennis Poupard and Paula Kepos. Vol. 29. Detroit Gale Research Company, 1988. 198-200. Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Robert Scholes. New York, Penguin/Viking, 1996. Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York Schocken Books, 1992. Ruskin, John. Grotesque Renaissance. The Stones of Venice The Fall. 1853. New York Garland Publishing, 1979. 112-65. Rpt. in Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism. Ed. Jelena O. Krstovic. Vol. 2. Detroit Gale Research Company, 1989. 21-2. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. T. J. B. Spencer. New York Penguin, 1996.