However, there is more to life then living in the cave. Once one of the men sees the light, they will slowly learn to embrace the new reality of sunlight. The idea of the Allegory of the Cave and other ideals of Socrates, while centuries old, continue appear in today’s literature and media. Award winning film director Christopher Nolan’s Batman Trilogy is filled with the philosophies of Plato and Socrates. The third installment of the trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, makes an almost exact illustration of the Allegory of the Cave and how it affects current society.
In the Allegory of the Cave, there is a group of prisoners chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. One prisoner is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not reality at all. Although the prisoners were experiencing something different than what was happening outside the cave, they were still in the same reality as the people outside the cave. In the Man Who Lived Underground, Fred Daniels, a young black man unjustly accused of murdering a woman, is forced into signing a confession.
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. The material world is the one we can see, touch, hear and smell, are just false truths of the reality.
The only thing they could see was the shadows on the stonewall in front of them when the lights come in from the entrance. Thus, for these people in the cave the reality is the world of shadow. They then gradually develop a whole ideology of shadow—there were authorities that teach them the meaning of the shadows. However, one day an outsider went into the cave. He broke the chains and tried to take these people to the outside world.
Determined to spread the word of the Lord, Rachel was willing to put herself in harms way. She knew the people of Auca needed to hear the Gospel as quickly as possible. After her brother, Nate, and four other men were speared to death, a year and five
Throughout An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro allows for an extensive exploration into the destruction and reconstruction of physical landscapes, a motif that permeates the novel, providing insight into the fragility and disillusionment of Japan. This inability to progress beyond past trauma is foregrounded in the line “…A rainy morning… looking from under my umbrella at those skeletal remains”. Through the evocative descriptions of demolished buildings, Ishiguro utilises deathly connotations and the motif of a graveyard to suggest a pervading and inescapable sense of destruction and deterioration. The use of pathetic fallacy, further denotes the infiltrating sense of gloom and decay, drawing on the profound connection the Japanese have with their past and memories. Through Ono’s descriptions of Mrs Kawakami’s bar, Ishiguro continues to establish a sombre atmosphere and melancholic nostalgia of what was once a thriving pleasure district, overwhelmed by a perpetual sense of loss and devastation.
We find in any story what we want to find. It is all in the eye of the beholder. And if I see him as an arrogant fool, who is determined to fight for what he believes in and delusionally optimistic for his future, so be it. We all are entitled to our
In his Republic, we see a group chained and only able to see the shadows of things outside the cave – their truth is that everything is a shadow. This is everyone’s truth, this is right, until someone is released. Upon exiting the cave, they see the world around them and learn that the shadows on the wall are simple depictions of physical things beyond the cave. The sole adventurer outside the cave attempts to go back into the cave and tell everyone that what they know is wrong, that they are right because they have witnessed what is beyond the cave – the truth they are telling, their truth is the way and only way. Plato believed that “absolute, objective Truth” should “be housed in a particular privileged individual,” taken in the form of a philosopher-king (Salvatore 155).
It is not the fear itself that is interesting, but the battle of overcoming it can be an exciting tale. In “The Swimmer”, the main character overcomes her fears, and does what she wants to – swimming. That the journey towards success included a bathing costume, a nylon fishing net and a swan, could nobody had known. But does one ever know, what one need to do to overcome one’s
In the short story “Axolotl” by Julio Cortazar, an axolotl is reflecting upon the past and the metamorphosis it underwent to become the creature it is now. The story begins with a young boy visiting the zoo in his town and spotting the axolotls in the aquarium. He goes,“every morning, morning and afternoon some days” as these creatures begin to take hold of him. He begins to search for information about them and when he visits them he starts to perceive a connection as he finds more and more similarities. Their captivating gold eyes are of particular interest to him as he stares through the glass.