Defending Purgatorio : Dante, Brooks, and Finding One’s Celestial Place

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of Defending Your Life(1991) and Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio, reading both texts as cultural indicators of historicized perspectives representing our potential post-existence, a vision of the afterlife revealed. Different as they appear on the surface—vernacular Italian poetry and commercial, comedic film—each narrative contextualizes a belief system suggesting a higher plane of existence in which imperfect souls must glean wisdom from a past life and ultimately learn how they have erred. In Purgatorio, the soul embraces its sins, learns from them, atones, and thus moves closer to God, his love, and ultimately, Heaven. In Defending Your Life, Albert Brooks’ soul similarly has to achieve greater understanding to comprehend earthly missteps so he can truly understand his life and the universe, use more of his brain, and ultimately move onward, just as Dante and his fellow sinners wished to do.