The series to which this volume belongs is dominated by the names of narrative writers. Dante is a narrative poet; and few readers of The Divine Comedy will doubt that the poem stands comparison – for its portrayal of event and character – with the greatest epics of antiquity and the greatest novels of the modern tradition. Representing himself as protagonist in the story he has to tell, Dante writes of a journey which is simultaneously inward and outward: inwardly, he sets himself to explore both the worst and best of which human beings are capable; outwardly, he aims to investigate nothing less than the whole of the physical and spiritual universe. At every stage, the storyteller dramatises the shock or pleasure of discovery; at every stage, the poet produces words and images appropriate to each new development in experience.

To cite two of the most important modern Dante critics, Erich Auerbach can draw parallels between the Inferno IX and Book XIII of Homer's Iliad, while Gianfranco Contini speaks of resemblances between Dante's work and Proust's. It is nonetheless unusual for an introductory study of the Comedy to concentrate, as the present study will, upon the characteristics of its poetic and narrative form. And there are grounds to suspect that any approach confining itself to these lines could misrepresent or diminish Dante's achievement.

To see why these suspicions arise, consider how difficult it is to describe the Comedy as a fiction.