Ciacco

In the sixth canto he is the Florentine glutton who pushes himself upright under the rain and asks Dante to recognise him; in the game he is the first soul that opens the economy the whole descent runs on. You are the only living thing down here, so you are the only one who can carry a name back out, and no soul ever stops you for any other reason.

There are three ways of taking a name, and they are three different games. Promising it, which means saying that you will go back up and write it down. Tearing it out by force, as Dante does with Bocca degli Abati. Or getting it by lying, by saying that you are staying down here too: whoever believes you tells you the truest and most shameful thing he has, because nobody will ever hear it, and leaves no expectation on you at all. The book does not weigh by the number of its pages, it weighs by how much you have committed yourself, and a living man loaded with promises smells of the way out.

Ciacco is the limit case, which is why he stands at the beginning: he does not give a name, he gives a nickname. He is written into the book under the sin of the second circle instead of the third, worth half a name, because a nickname opens less road. Lie to him instead and he leaves you nothing to write down and tells you how the place works, which in the circle of the rain is the only thing worth having. What the game says when you look at him: the only one of the submerged who sits up and the only one who speaks, because the punishment of gluttony is lying flat under a rain that swallows whoever swallowed. He gives a nickname and not a name, and that is his real sentence: what is left of him among the living is not a man but a voice.