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Allegory Of The Cave: Greece's Classical Era

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Allegory of the Cave

Everyone at one point or another has questioned reality. Plato, back in Greece’s Classical Era, wrote, “Allegory of the Cave”. This allegory talks about prisoners, and how one unique prisoner is treated after being trapped his entire life. In The Cave, Plato urges readers to believe that there are no facts, only interpretations, by finding your own reality based on your own beliefs, not others.

The first thing used in the allegory to prove my point that there are only facts, no interpretations is plot events. “ simply these [namely the shadows]? GLAUCON: Certainly. SOCRATES: Now if they were able to say something about what they saw and to talk it over, do you not think that they would regard that which they saw on the wall as beings? GLAUCON: They would have to” (Sheehan 2). For example, the prisoners versus the freed prisoner. In the story, the prisoners never cry out for help. If the freed prisoner was taken back to the cave and chained up again, he might cry for help because he knew that they were actually trapped in a cave, and knew that there was an outside world. The prisoners in the cave who were never freed do not realize they are trapped, given the fact that they have never known anything except the cave. This reveals the theme that there are …show more content…

Under "pain, rage, blindness", Plato states, "And when he got into the sunlight, wouldn't his eyes be filled with the glare, and wouldn't he thus be unable to see any of the things that are now revealed to him as the unhidden?" (Sheehan 4). This could be a metaphor for how in the real world it takes time to see things in a different perspective than what you have known your whole life, like it takes time for his eyes to adjust to see reality. There are also displays of symbolism in the fire, depicting false truth, the sun that depicts actual truth, and even the cave that could represent a barrier between reality and what we choose to

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