Inferno: The Silver-Haired Woman

Who is the silver-haired woman? In the book, Inferno by Dan Brown, this character starts off without the assurance that she is even real. Robert Langdon, the protagonist, sees her in dreams after his amnesia and only refers to her as the silver-haired woman. When they meet she is given a name and a reason to why she was in Langdon’s dreams. She is the character with the most influence on Langdon from the beginning and is on Langdon’s side. This silver-haired woman changes from being in a dream to being real to making an ultimate decision.

In the beginning, there was Robert Langdon and his companion, Sienna, but there was also another woman in Langdon’s dreams. In his dreams “The silver-haired woman with the amulet” calls to him. This description shows that she is old to have silver hair and the fact that Langdon calls it silver instead of gray shows that she must distinguished from all others. The amulet again shows that she would be old enough to have something from her youth that may have taught her a life lesson. All of these descriptors combined shows that she has wisdom and is highly respectable. In his dreams this woman of authority appears and instructs “Seek … And ye shall find.”(9) Thanks to Robert’s amnesia, he does not know what she is talking about; he only has the feeling that he knows her. This sentence, repeated in his many dreams, guides him to where he needs to go. The silver-haired woman must have been important to Langdon to appear in his dreams, important enough to fight the amnesia. What this woman is guiding him towards is to stop a man who refers to himself as the Shade. The Shade is a mysterious character for much of the book, although two things are clear. He thinks of himself as “your salvation” (48) and...

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... what reverse what may save the human race one day. With this in mind, she does not announce a clear side she is on when she leaves for Geneva. This is who Dr. Sinskey is and how she thinks.

The silver-haired woman transformed from a character in a dream to a doctor to someone who considers both sides. But in the end of the book, she still goes back to Geneva with stopping the disease in mind because she knows how the rest of the world would respond to having the right of being fruitful taken away. Dr. Sinskey may not have been the protagonist, but was just as important and is the reason that Langdon could have even accomplished what he did. The big thought following her endlessly throughout the story is “If you could throw a switch and randomly kill half the population on earth, would you do it?” (218)

Works Cited

Brown, Dan. Inferno. New York: Doubleday, 2013.