Reading the Divine Comedy for the first time: does anyone else read the impetus for his book to be an attempted, or at least contemplated, suicide on the part of Dante?

A couple of disclaimers:

1. I'm only on my first read-through, currently halfway through Purgatorio.

2. I may not be the most attentive reader in the world, there could be a line totally dismissing this whole post that I just flat out missed.

3. I'm not reading in the original Italian.

4. Maybe I'm just wrong. I don't really have much proof, and you can't prove anything in Dante anyway because so much of it is symbolic.

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So, I'm currently reading Dante for the first time, and luckily also have a uni class in it with access to a professor whom I can ask all sorts of questions. And he never really likes my questions so I don't really ask that many anymore. He definitely rejected this "theory" of mine. But I really want to share it and see what others think.

So, basically, my question is the following: why does the story even take place? What is the impetus for his being allowed to go to the next world to begin with?

At my uni course, we went through a brief outline of Dante's life and basically, from what I gather, he had a pretty decent life minus the fact that his true love was (a) married to someone else and (b) dead, but he had a decent job, a wife and three children (so he couldn't really hate his wife), decent property and friends. And then, one day, out of the blue while he's literally on duty in Rome as ambassadpr, he receives news that he's lost his job, all his property is confistacted, he's exiled, he won't see his children for an indefinite amount of time (perhaps forever?), he can't go back and meet his friends. His life is turned upside down. All of this right at his mid-life crisis of being ~30 years old.

Perhaps it's that I'm turning 30 this year myself and so I read it specifically in the context of mid-life crisis, but I just read the opening and felt that "this is a man who was thinking about just ending it all, and as he was getting close to it, Vergilius appears out of nowhere [sent there by Beatrice] to show him the horrors of Hell, the tedium of Purgatorio, and the bliss of Heaven, to show that he (Dante) must carry on." That is the impetus for him being allowed to enter Hell.

Song 13 – The Forest of Suicide, to me is filled with all of these "this will be my fate if I commit suicide"-moments from Dante, as he feels pity on the tree and even Virgil does the same, which is quite rare for Virgil.

Cato – I know you can't prove this or whatever, and that's not my point, but the choice of Cato is the prime example for Dante of the man who committed suicide but was still viewed as a hero by many of his contemporaries, so much so that Cato, as a pagan, could be elevated above Limbo. Not even Plato could escape Limbo, but Cato could, and he committed suicide. And Dante, contemplating suicide, views Cato as a possible way of committing suicide and still escaping Hell.

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Anyways, these are my thoughts right now. I know that he ends up meeting Beatrice in Heaven so he'll probably realize that he just needs to chug it out for another 30 years and not take the easy road out before he can be rewarded with Heaven.

I'm probably wrong. But nevermind that. What do you think is the impetus for Dante's journey? I asked my professor and he literally said: "There are many interpretations and we can't know." and that was the end of that discussion. I don't care about knowing. I want to know what you think. How do you make the story work? What makes the story work for you?