Primo Levi is a writer who, by his own admission, ‘strive[s] … to pass from the darkness in to light.’ He repeatedly emphasises that retrospectively, he derived positive value from his year of imprisonment at Auschwitz. I would argue that what he has to say about Auschwitz is informed by certain premises: that meaning can be derived from nihilistic experience, that reason can help us to compass insanity, that while language might fail to communicate the fullness of horror, it should nevertheless be used, because silence is self-internment and an expression of despair in other people. In my view, Levi is a katabatic writer for whom Hell is refashioned into a journey and a process through which one gains a more complex and rigorous understanding of selfhood in extremis.

To align Levi with the ‘talkers’ rather than the ‘silent’ survivors of a journey into Hell is to situate his writing somewhere in relation to the tradition of Dantean katabasis. Levi's major allusions to Dante's Inferno, along with his explicit verbal echoes of the poem, have already been discussed by Risa Sodi and others. In brief, Levi alludes to Dante both to verify his own experience of Hell – what Dante imagined, the prisoners actually experienced – and to underline the important contrasts – Dante's Hell is an expression of divine Justizia, Auschwitz of human injustice. Like Dante, he presents himself as an observer of Hell, and as we shall see, he also exploits the distance between the naive ingenue in the camp (Dante's pilgrim or protagonist) and the survivor-witness he became (Dante the poet or narrator).