Changing morality in Dante's Inferno, Hamlet, The Trial and The Deaths of JoyceEveryone remembers the evil villains who terrorize happy people in fairy tales. Indeed, many of these fairy tales are defined by their clearly defined archetypes, good and evil, using clichéd physical stereotypes. What is remarkable is that these fairy tales are mostly either ancient or based on stories from ancient times. Modern stories and epics do not offer these clear definitions; they force the reader to continually redefine definitions of morality between the hero who is not quite good and the villain who is not so despicable. From Dante's Inferno, through the twisting mental visions of Shakespeare's Hamlet, through the labyrinth of Kafka's The Trial and culminating with Joyce's abstract realization of morality in "The Dead", authors are at taken with this development. In the literary progression toward the modern world, the increasing abstraction of evil from its classical archetype to an alien, supernatural entity without limits or remedy strongly suggests the pugnacious assault on individualism in the face of the dualistic and thematically oligopolistic legacy of the literature. Faced with this gradient of morality, it is useful to first examine a work of ancient literature whose strong moral purity is unshakable; for the purposes of this discussion, Dante's Inferno provides this model. It is easy enough to discover Dante's dualistic construction of morality in his winding caverns of Hell; each severe, finite circle of Hell is associated with a clear sin that is both definable and directly punishable. As Dante descends into this moral machination, he notes that like is found with like in every medium of the paper......Akespearean critique. Ed. Laurie Lanzen Harris. Flight. 1. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1984. 234-7. Fort, Keith. “The function of style in Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” Sewanee Review 72 (1964): 643-51. Rep. in 20th century literary criticism. Ed. Dennis Poupard and Paula Kepos. Flight. 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. Rep. in criticism of classical and medieval literature. Ed. Jelena O. Krstovic. Flight. 2. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1989. 21-2.Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. GRT Spencer. New York: Penguin, 1996.