Read it through once

Dante's method is therefore essentially dramatic rather than didactic; and this also explains the unity and the tension of the "Commedia". The poem is the record of a personal experience; it is at once the description of a spiritual pilgrimage and the analysis of the soul that makes that pilgrimage. The unity of the poem is not that of a treatise, where successive sections add to an abstract argument; it is the unity of a moral process, where each incident is an episode in the development of the moral consciousness. The reader's interest is not intellectual curiosity alone, it is the same interest which we take in the fortunes of a living man who is undergoing change.