Irony In Plato's The Allegory Of The Cave

If you were locked in a room and the only thing you knew were illusion of shapes made by shadows and sounds mimicking the shadows, anything outside of what you knew would be foreign and rejected, staying aloof to all the obscurities of the outside. The overall theme that Plato shows in “The Allegory of the Cave” is that you should always be open minded and accept life in different perspectives, plato proved this by his use of symbolism, imagery, irony. ¨The Allegory of the Cave¨shows that we humans are afraid of gaining new knowledge, because the unknown is inevitable and unable to be grasped, therefore we tend to think our perceptions of life are true. In the story, the author presented the sun as the first thing the escaped prisoner saw, because it symbolized that once we open our minds the unknown can be eye opening to new comings in life. “ And if someone even forced him to look into the glare of the fire, would his eyes not hurt him, and would he not then turn away and flee [back] to that which he is capable of looking at? quote” (Sheehan 2). This shows that

“ Now if once again, along with those who had remained shackled there, the freed person had to engage in the business of asserting and maintaining opinions about the shadows -- while his eyes are still weak and before they have readjusted, an adjustment that would require quite a bit of time -- would he not then be exposed to ridicule down there? And would they not let him know that he had gone up but only in order to come back down into the cave with his eyes ruined -- and thus it certainly does not pay to go up” (Sheehan 517). The chained prisoners were afraid of going out the cave because they did not wanna face the truth. The prisoners rejected knowledge and wanted to remain