Dan Brown's Inferno

Over break, I read Dan Brown’s Inferno, a novel chronicling Robert Langdon, a renowned symbologist, in his journey across Europe. Without giving too much away, I will say that, like in many mystery novels, in the middle of the book there was a major twist. However, in this particular case, the twist came in the form of a flashback. The problem was, Dan Brown intentionally misdirects the reader by accrediting the flashback to the wrong character. At the end of the book, which this twist on a twist revealed, I began to think about all of the author misdirection in the book, and realized that everything Dan Brown writes, in Inferno as well as some of his other famous works, has multiple layers of authors, similar to many of the works we have read this year.

Robert Langdon, the books main character, is a (fictional) professor of symbology at Harvard, and uses his skills in each book in order to follow trails laid out by symbols. The authors of the symbols are taking part in a form of author misdirection all their own: putting meaning a layer below the surface in whichever medium they choose to use. I came to the conclusion that any one of these books would be exceedingly interesting to read in class, especially when I began The Final Solution and realized that we were reading a mystery anyway.