In life there are many misconceptions, people look at something and automatically make a mental note of what it is and what they think about it. Whether they are correct or not an opinion has been formed, and in order to find the truth, they must be willing to open their mind to all possibilities. Not everyone will be willing to change their opinion on something so it ultimately comes down to convincing them of your theory or changing your ways. In the stories The Allegory of the Cave by Plato and Black Men and Public Space by Brent Staples, you will see how the individual deals with people’s misconceptions about themselves.
Plato wrote The Allegory of the Cave as dialogue of Socrates talking with his students. In this story Socrates explains how three men had been chained up like “prisoners” facing the back wall of a cave from the time they were born, unable to see anything but
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In The Allegory of the Cave, the prisoner that escaped tries continuously to inform the others of the new world. Yet even when they threatened to murder him if he let them out of their chains, he still tried his hardest to get them to believe what he had seen. Socrates then states that “I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain those false notions and live in this miserable manner” (Plato 615). So no matter how badly they treat him he feels the need to try and persuade them to come out into the real world. In Black Men and Public Space, when people are frightened by him he begins to change the way he acts around people. Staples would whistle music from famous classical composers so people would feel more comfortable as they were passing by. He even waited sometimes for people to pass him, if they seemed on edge, so they wouldn’t feel like he was following them (Staples 466). He had to completely change how he acted around people just to avoid being treated like a