Similarities Between The Allegory Of The Cave And The Truman Show

“Plato’s Allegory of the Cave” depicts a group of prisoners who live in a cave, shackled by chains, facing a blank wall within the cave, with a faint fire burning behind them. Throughout their confinement, they observe a variety of shadows travel through the cave of people carrying unidentified objects. But, one of the shackled prisoners gains freedom in the cave and eventually discovers the reality of the outside world. “The Truman Show” follows the main protagonist Truman Burbank, who unknowingly lives on a reality TV show surrounded by people whom he personally knows as his wife, best friend, mother, neighbors, and more. However, Truman begins to question his existence in such a reality after his encounters with Sylvia, a woman who left

A similarity between the two mediums is the characters, that being the enlightened one, or the prisoner and Truman Burbank, both become aware of their surroundings of the environment they live within and know that where they currently reside is not real and finally begin to discover the truth in their realities. The cave in the allegory and Seahaven in the film are both artificial universes that the main protagonists of their stories lived within and believed were their utmost reality. In Plato’s “theory of forms,” the theory mentions two different worlds identified as the “visible” world and the “intelligible” world. Plato asserts that the visible world is a “fake” universe that primarily appeals to our five senses and is made from lesser representations of the true world. The cave and Seahaven are both visible worlds with limited individuals and limited knowledge. Addressing the sense of sight, the enlightened prisoner only sees the wall in front of them and the shadows passing by; similarly, Truman sees and interacts with the same people in his neighborhood daily. Such limitations to their senses grow routine, which causes them to be thought of as real in the end. They eventually become self-aware of the visible world and seek to find the intelligible world outside their senses and

A message from the Allegory of the Cave is that knowing can be a really strong concept and that while learning the truth can be frightening, it is ultimately rewarding in the long run. The freed prisoner originally resisted understanding that the world outside of the shadows was not real, but with time, he grew to accept the new reality and ultimately became happy knowing the world he found. Making the connection to my personal life, I learned about new experiences like a breakup and the loss of a loved one, but I refused to accept that these were actual life occurrences. Despite this, realizing the truths behind these events helped me see the world and the true cycles of life from a fresh viewpoint. The Truman Show illustrates that it can be challenging to determine the reality of events. During the duration of the film, Truman dedicated and risked his life to uncover the true world outside of the reality TV broadcast that had been fabricated for him his entire life. Despite such difficulties, he eventually found a door at the end of Seahaven that exposed the other world he longed for. Connecting the connection to my personal life and learning about new circumstances, experiences, and general occurrences in my life were challenging to conquer. Yet, that is how reality functions and such meetings continue to be inevitable; it