aph: While I was all intent on watching him, he looked at me, and with his hands he spread his chest and said: "See how I split myself! (Lines 28-30) The image of the man using his hands to pull his wound apart is extremely vivid; it reminds me, for instance, of when Superman pulls his shirt apart to reveal the capital S. Superman becomes another example, like the barrel, which is useful to the reader in spite of the fact it fails to express what Dante can. As Dante watches the man who has just been split into two, the man looks back at Dante. And as the man turns his attention to Dante, so do we. Furthermore, when the man says "See how I split myself" we also hear Dante say these words to us. Just as the man forces his viewer (Dante) to examine his wounds, Dante forces the read to examine the hideousness he has produced. The man has a strange pride in splittng himself open. Dante also takes tremendous pride in describing this scene, which he first claimed was impossible to ever put into words. By pretending he could not express the image and then by fully expressing it, Dante is reminding the reader of his extraordinary talent and he is also forcing the reader to read more careful. After examining this single passage from Dante's Inferno, I came to a new understanding of the relationship between Dante and La Commedia , as well as between Dante's images and his poetic task....
