In life, the world one lives in is always assumed to be the reality, without anyone questioning its credibility. As Iris Murdoch once said, “[People] live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”(Iris Murdoch Quotes). In The Allegory of the Cave by Plato, prisoners are trapped in a cave and chained so that they are to face a wall and only see the shadows of objects that pass behind them. However, one prisoner is released and forced out into the reality, allowing the reader to understand that the world one sees and experiences is not the reality, but rather an illusion. Similarly, in The Truman Show by Andrew Niccol, Truman Bank has been growing up in Seahaven Island, a place created just for him to live in for a television show that is all about him. Throughout the film, Truman realizes that Seahaven is not the real world, and viewers see his journey to get out of this illusion, and into reality outside the false world. Both The Allegory of the Cave and The Truman Show prove that the physical world is an illusion that prevents one from discovering reality. The concept of illusion versus reality is evident in both works through similarities in plot, similarities in symbolism, and differences in character.
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley presents us with a Dystopian society, for as we read, there is a revelation of the true nature of the society. The basis of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is that the shadows in which the trapped conformists see are the flawed reflections of ideal forms, such as beauty. Within the society of Brave New World, the entire population appears perfect for they are manufactured to be that way, therefore, the ‘outsiders’ appear as the flawed reflections of their ideal forms, which is present in the Allegory of the Cave, as well as other similarities.
1) In the allegory of the cave, Plato’s main goal is to illustrate his view of knowledge. A group of prisoners have been chained in a cave their whole lives and all they have ever been exposed to were shadows on the wall and voices of people walking by. The prisoners in the cave represent humans who only pay attention to the physical aspects of the world (sight and sound). Once one of them escapes and sees the blinding light, all he wants is to retreat back to the cave and return to his prior way of living. This shows that Plato believes enlightenment and education are painful, but the pain is necessary for enlightenment and it is worth it.
Plato tells us that the prisoners are confused on their emergence from the cave and that the prisoners’ will be blinded once they had been freed from the cave. After a period of time they will adjust their eyesight and begin to understand the true reality that the world poses. The stubbornness to develop a different perspective is seen in much of today’s society. The allegory of the cave is an understanding of what the true world is and how many people never see it because of their views of the society they are raised in.
In the “Allegory of the Cave”, Plato breaks the story into four main scenes to demonstrate the path to enlightenment for the unenlightened reader. He uses a story of a man trapped in a cave,
Throughout the movie, Truman begins to realize that the whole world revolves around him and how the producers of the show have created his reality, thus developing his sociological imagination. To start,
Society is often content with adhering to orders and often don't question the true essence of what they’re being told. Plato ventured towards this issue within his famous “The Allegory of the Cave” by using rhetorical devices such as metaphors to illustrate his message. Plato explores the philosophy of society in a particular structure that forces the reader to ponder on the mindset of a blind individual who finally sees the light.
In the movie, The Matrix “the matrix” is a computer engineered world that is blinding individuals from the truth. The film The Truman Show, displays the life progression of Truman Burbank from the artificial world to the real world.
In both of the cases, the author and the director used to method of symbolism to help them get their purpose across to the readers. Many objects in both of the stories were given a meaning and an assumed understanding of what it is symbolising. Shadows is something that is presented in both of the cases, in The Allegory of the Cave there were objects that walked past the fire behind the prisoners, which gave out shadows to the prisoners to see. The shadows represented the truth that was not allowed to be seen by the prisoners but was able to get a small sense of what it is. In The Truman Show, there was a character who played the role of the shadow for Truman.
The Truman show is a movie that’s plot is based off the republic by Plato, written in 360 B.C.E. The Truman show is about a man who’s lived his entire life in a fictional town that is actually a TV show set. He does not know that his life is a TV show but he starts to learn the truth throughout the movie. Although Peter Weir reuses the idea of a cave were stuck in and that the truth is hard to realize from Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”, the transformation of the truth being much more than what we perceive and getting yourself out of your cave ultimately leads to a deeper truth that is as philosophically compelling. As Plato writes, “Human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood” meaning that literally, people are trapped in a cave. This is directly used the Truman show, as the TV show set is the cave that Truman in chained in.
In Plato’s allegory of the cave he enplanes the effect of society. In the allegory there are people chained in a cave. All they know are the shadows that they see. The shadows are being made by the shadow master who is in front of a fire. So if the shadow master shows them a shadow of a toy dragon then the people in the cave will believe that dragons are real because they saw the shadow.
Another connection the Truman Show and 1984 has is the “thought police”; both worlds has people that keep their society in check and punishes people who breaks
In "The Machine Stops," people have put their entire faith in a machine which eventually lets them down, and Communication is made as a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine called the speaking apparatus, with which people conduct their only activity, they sharing ideas and knowledge. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato distinguishes between people who mistake sensory knowledge for the truth and people who do see the truth, the cave represents people who believe that knowledge comes from what we see and hear in the world empirical evidence. The cave shows that believers of empirical knowledge are trapped in a ‘cave’ of misunderstanding, Although, the prisoner managed to break his bonds and soon discovered that his reality was not what he thought it was and in “The Machine Stops," it’s a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Now they live in isolation below ground in a standard 'cell ', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the
In “The Allegory of the Cave”, Plato’s idea of the human who escaped the cave, but came back to tell about his learnings but the other people in the cave did not want to listen to him since they believed that the cave was the real truth and did not want to be educated about the outside
In other words they only know about that false reality that they are living in and to them there is nothing else. Plato then goes on to describe of how those people are enlightened when one is taken out of the cave and brought into the outside world they are shown the real reality and “enlightened”. If one of the people is enlightened he or she will be motivated to help those in the cave