Edward T. Nad

Edward T. Nad is the twenty-one-year-old drummer, occasional singer, and self-proclaimed rockstar at the center of the opening narrative of Dante’s Infernos: Squirt Guns in Hades. His decisive significance lies in the gap between the heroic identity he announces and the absurd circumstances that surround him: he imagines himself destined to rule the world through rock music, yet finds himself broke, romantically abandoned, trapped in a furry costume, and fleeing former bandmates through a forest. That gap makes him both protagonist and comic instrument, turning personal grievance into the book’s first engine of movement.

Identity and Self-Invention

Edward T. Nad dislikes the name his parents gave him because it sounds ordinary rather than rock-and-roll. He repeatedly contrasts it with names such as Sting, Bono, and Slash, treating a stage name as evidence of artistic seriousness even while refusing, or failing, to replace his own. His identity is therefore built through performance before it is secured by achievement. He calls himself a rockstar and claims that he has an active, authoritative understanding of music, but the surrounding evidence presents a young man whose confidence is much larger than his practical control of events.

His narration is direct, defensive, and insistently conversational. He anticipates the reader’s curiosity about his band, his girlfriend, his clothing, his instruments, his parents, and even the meter maid car he drives, then mocks those questions as “squirrelly” while supplying the answers himself. He says that he has hardly read anything and has never written a novel, setting his rockstar identity against literary culture even as his story becomes a novel about a rocker. The result is a self-portrait shaped by contradiction: Edward wants to control the terms under which he is understood, but every explanation exposes another piece of his insecurity.

The Band and Its Breakup

Edward was one half of a two-person band with Beatrice, who played guitar and sang lead vocals, while he played drums and sang when her voice had been exhausted. He describes her vocal strain as frequent but also calls it sexy, revealing how quickly practical observations become romantic recollection. Beatrice’s departure for Venice breaks up the original band and leaves Edward feeling middle-aged despite being only twenty-one. The breakup is consequently not merely a private disappointment; it threatens the musical identity through which he understands himself.

Edward offers two incompatible accounts of the separation. In one imagined version, Beatrice has dumped him, gone to Venice, and may be listening to a gondolier serenade her with bad Italian love songs; he would fly from New York and plead for her return so that their band could rule the world. He immediately rejects that scenario as the plot of a novel, insisting that he is a rockstar rather than a novelist and that he is never going to Venice. Elsewhere, he claims that Beatrice thinks she dumped him, but that he secretly dumped her first without her knowing it. The contradiction turns romantic loss into another stage on which Edward protects his pride. The narrative’s later account confirms the practical fact that Beatrice left for Europe and that Edward is stranded without her, while his competing versions show how unstable his own explanation remains.

The larger premise extends beyond Edward’s immediate account. After leaving for Europe, Beatrice has second thoughts about the breakup and asks Virgil, their former manager and travel agent, to bring Edward to her without telling him. Edward does not know this plan when he describes himself as unable to reach Venice. His apparent refusal of the journey therefore becomes part of an irony produced by concealed information: the abandoned rocker believes the distance is final while another character is already arranging his passage toward her.

The Chase Through the Dark Wood

Edward’s principal opening action begins on the day before Good Friday, which he jokingly renames Bad Thursday. He is wearing a bunny costume and is being pursued through a dark wood by new band members dressed as a lion, a wolf, and a leopard. He identifies their costumes with Satan’s dark brood and interprets their anger through the inflated logic of his own celebrity: they are supposedly resentful because they will never become rock gods like him. The chase is thus both physical danger and a comic enactment of the rivalry that has consumed his band.

The immediate dispute concerns the band’s name. Edward champions “The Beelzebubbas,” calling it “Devil Grunge” and “Dunge,” while the others reject it as a name that sounds like dung. He also defends “Grain of Sand and the Clams” against alternatives such as “Guilloteens,” insisting that his proposals demonstrate genius. His argument with Phil becomes personal because Edward has caught Phil attempting to replace his amplifier with an inferior piece of equipment bought online. Edward recalls insulting the equipment’s origin and then admits that Phil’s anger culminated in kicking the amplifier, getting his foot stuck, and carrying lasting angst from the humiliating incident. In retrospect, Edward recognizes that he should have expelled Phil from the band; instead, Phil is among those chasing him.

The pursuers are differentiated through Edward’s comic judgments. Phil is the spotted leopard, described as a fraud and as the immediate source of the equipment conflict. Tasha, in the wolf costume, is called a she-wolf and criticized for demanding more than a quarter of the band’s gig revenue because she attracts both male and female fans. Geri, the lion, is the most angst-ridden and ambitious, marked by a Mohawk and by a desire to keep the band on the road for eighteen months without interruption. Their demands and resentments transform the band from a musical unit into a quarrelsome economic and creative collective, with Edward’s vanity at its center.

The chase becomes physically chaotic when a branch catches one of Edward’s floppy ears and spins the furry head of the costume sideways, leaving him unable to see. He rolls down an embankment, passes over a tin can and a possibly squealing forest creature, becomes airborne after striking a log, and lands in a creek bed as a two-hundred-pound pink mass. Cold water slowly enters the costume while he lies semi-conscious. His blurred visions combine budding trees, wild sunflowers, Beatrice singing onstage, and the flames of Hades, linking his immediate comic ordeal to the book’s larger Dantean and infernal framework.

The Easter Bunny and the Failed Rock Career

The costume is not a brief disguise but part of Edward’s precarious employment. He has spent eight hours waving at traffic, leaving his arms too sore to play drumbeats when he returns to the apartment. The costume lining chafes him, a chocolate milkshake is thrown at him, and a trucker moons him. These humiliations expose the economic underside of his rockstar self-image: between relationships and bands, Edward works in a highly visible but degrading role while continuing to narrate himself as an exceptional performer.

At the Zany Zoo Travel Agency in Florence, New York, a woman asks him to conduct an Easter egg hunt for her children on the agency’s front lawn. Edward refuses and tells her to leave, prompting Virgil to rebuke him after the woman’s husband threatens to stop using the travel agency. The episode deepens the conflict between Edward’s self-conception and the practical obligations of his surroundings. He treats the public-facing job as beneath him, yet his conduct directly damages Virgil’s business and contributes to the instability that culminates in the later pursuit.

The argument over the band name finally erupts on that same lawn. Geri begins beating Edward over the head with the Zany Zoo sign, the other former band members join the melee, cars honk, and children stop their bicycles to watch. Edward ducks out of the clash of swinging signs and hears a passerby call for the Easter Bunny to be hanged by his ears. He runs without looking back, becoming lost in the dense forest as dusk approaches. The pink costume makes him easy to see, so the very disguise that marks him as a comic public figure also helps his pursuers follow him.

Narrative Role and Significance

Edward narrates his own story in the first person, but his narration is not a neutral record. It repeatedly interrupts action with explanations, anticipates imagined readerly questions, revises its own claims, and converts embarrassment into swagger. The story therefore reaches the reader through an unreliable but highly revealing self-presentation: Edward may misstate motives or reshape relationships to preserve his status, yet his evasions disclose precisely what he is trying to protect.

His movement through the opening episode is a grotesque inversion of the conventional rockstar quest. Instead of traveling triumphantly toward fame or crossing an exciting international threshold, he is chased from a failed gig-related dispute, rolls through mud and cold water in a bunny costume, and flees toward the outskirts of the woods. Even the band’s grandiose naming debate is reduced to bodily slapstick and public spectacle. The comic degradation does not erase Edward’s ambition; it gives that ambition its sharpest form by showing how stubbornly he maintains the language of greatness when the evidence around him insists on vulnerability.

At the forest’s edge, Edward sees a man in a Hawaiian shirt waving him toward the travel agency’s blinking red sign. This image closes the supplied opening sequence on a threshold: Edward has escaped the immediate crush of his former bandmates but has not reached safety, and the unknown man introduces a new direction into a story already shaped by travel, concealment, romantic pursuit, and the promise of Hades. Edward’s importance lies in making those large patterns comic and personal. Through him, an intercontinental journey modeled on Dante’s Inferno begins not with solemn pilgrimage, but with a young musician’s wounded pride, impossible band names, and a desperate run through the dark wood.