Death and the Afterlife in Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard and Dante’s Inferno

Journeys to the realm of the dead are among the oldest literary traditions across world cultures, and a comparison of Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard and Dante Alighieri's Inferno reveals how different cosmological systems shape literary representations of death, judgement, and spiritual consequence. This study examined how Tutuola's unnamed drinkard-hero and Dante's pilgrim navigate underworld realms shaped by their respective Yoruba and medieval Christian cosmologies. A mythocritical comparative methodology drawing on Jungian archetype theory and cultural theology was applied. Tutuola's Bush of Ghosts and Death's Town represent an animist afterlife rooted in Yoruba spiritual geography, while Dante's Inferno is organised according to Catholic moral theology and classical influences from Virgil and Aristotle. Both journeys are structured around encounters with spirits whose fates comment on the moral codes of their originating cultures. The analysis showed that both texts use the journey to the underworld as a didactic device, but Tutuola's cosmology is characterised by a playful ambiguity absent from Dante's rigidly hierarchical moral architecture. Tutuola's protagonist bargains and barters with supernatural entities rather than observing them from a safe moral distance. The study recommends this pairing as a foundational text combination for exploring world mythologies in Comparative Literature programmes at universities in the South West zone, where the Yoruba cultural framework enriches Tutuola's cosmological world-building.

Keywords: afterlife, cosmology, Tutuola, Dante, myth criticism