The Divine Comedy begins with Dante already lost in an oppressive environment from which he knows no escape. He doesn't remember how he arrived there, he only knows of his suffering within its borders, so much so that the fear of death barely overwhelms his own sense of despair. As he wanders in circles, his only companions are exotic and threatening beasts.
Before we even begin altering text, it is clear that Dante envisions Hell as the Cincinatti Zoo. Harambe mulls inside, ever circling a land filled with angry and territorial animals. This is the only world he can remember. He would take any opportunity to escape its confines, including death. What Harambe doesn't realize is that this prison is death itself, and death cannot release him. There is only hope, instead, for his soul.
A thoughtful critic might say: "But Finale, the gloomy wood is decidedly a web of sin. Certainly Harambe, in his purity, cannot be so easily transplanted into a narrative setting characterized by deadly vice."
And you would be correct. Harambe is innocent, and the gloomy wood is a maze of sin. However, these knotty trees and twisted roots are the sin of man. A zoo, perhaps man's most hubristic monument, bastardizes God's earth by reducing nature, and life itself, to a medium for its amusement. Harambe, born into and ultimately consumed by the sins of men, is thematically at home in Dante's wood.
Harambe's Inferno writes itself.
