In the analogy one of the prisoners is released, he turns around and discovers the fire, people and the rest of the things behind the prisoners. At first it was painful for the prisoner to look at the fire as his eyes were only accustomed to the shadows, gradually however he becomes used to the light and can see more clearly. Plato uses the cave to represent the World of Appearances or the Empirical World- the world in which we live. The shadows on the wall represent images, shadows and other illusions which we can see from the sun, here depicted as the fire. The prisoner is dragged by force out of the cave into the true sunlight.
Religion versus the Truth In Plato’s book The Republic, he explains an allegory. He names it the “Allegory of the cave”. Inside of this cave he talks about, are prisoners. The prisoners represent people who have never stepped out of their comfort zone and gained knowledge of new things. For all of the prisoner’s lives they have known of a wall and a small fire.
The only thing the people can hear are the voices of the people carrying the things and the shadows of the objects. Plato said if one of the people was to escape and tries to explain what he has seen there would not believe him because they have been in the cave since birth and have not seen the outside world. He explains the theory of the cave by assuming that the prisoners are average humans and they don’t want to change from the way they think of the word. It could also mean that we the people of the world are arrogant and ignorant and we don’t want to change our views about the world. The chains which are bound to the prisoners represent the mind and how they hold humans captives to what we want to believe because we have been brought up in that way.
Automatically the prisoners start to see little images and start to give it names, but there is a smart prisoners among them and he is the taken out of the cave; he then realizes that everything he thought was real was now nothing. He goes back to the other prisoners to show them what the truth really is and what a tree really looks like but they do not understand because they have not seen. Plato used Socrates to describe one of his main points in philosophy, senses can not be trusted and everything is related to logic and reasoning. A brief example being people see and experience and automatically think that what they have experienced was indeed the truth, such as the universe, because we can not see what is above and beyond we set our minds in our world much like the cave. Plato believes that sometimes things can not be understood by observation but by logic and meaning having a clearer picture on things.
They were very aware that the cave in which they sat was real. However, shadows projected on the wall in front of them were all they had to go by on understanding what the world was like, and for them what they saw they believed to be real. Once one was able to escape and leave the cave to see the difference between the shadows cast on the wall and the reality of what was casting those shadows
Wiesel however is a young jewish boy who did not know of the horrors that the Nazis brought down upon the jews. When the Germans occupied Wiesel's town, they were nice and compassionate, which lead the citizens to believe that the Germans would not do anything to harm them. While in the concentration camps, Wiesel lost his faith and realized what the world could come to; therefore, he matured extremely quickly. At the end of The Boy in Striped Pajamas, Bruno gets gassed because of one of the gas chambers his father ran. This caused great regret in his father as he now knows that he is responsible for all the jews and his son!
Plato’s Cave Plato’s cave includes prisoners locked up in a cave by hand and feet with their heads in a fixed position so that the only thing they can visibly see is the wall in front of them. Shadows appear on the walls seen in front of the prisoners allowing them to think the shadows are the reality of what is outside of the cave. Little do the cave prisoner’s know, the shadows are produced by a fire burning at the cave’s entrance and allows the objects being carried by the fire to produce shadows that reflect off the wall. The prisoner’s that are kept in the cave are to believe the cave is reality. If you then took one of the cave dwellers into the real life, they would feel threatened by the bright sunlight shining directly into their eyes.
The prisoners are only able to see what the puppeteers are casting on the wall, which they perceive as reality. However, one of the prisoners escaped the cave of darkness into the light of the new world and realized that the truth is beyond the chains. The Cathedra compares to this illusion by the sick marriage between a husband and a wife. The husband’s anger and resentment are his chains when compared to the “Allegory of the Cave.” This marriage struggled until the presence of a blind man, Robert, visited their home. Robert helped the husband see a different perspective of life and what reality really is.
The analogy starts by imagining a group of prisoners that are chained in such a way that they can only see the cave wall in front of them. They have been this way since birth so they would assume that the cave wall is the material world. Behind them is a walkway with a low wall in front of it in which travellers carrying artefacts or statues would travel across. Behind these people is a fire which casts shadows of the artefacts against the cave wall. Naturally, when the people walked across with their various artefacts the prisoners would only see their shadows and if a traveller was to talk, they would logically assume that the sound or voice had come from the shadow.
The narrator basked in the control he had over his brother. Because of the embarrassment the narrator felt about his brother, he became determined to make Doodle as normal as possible. Brother teaches Doodle how to walk, a kind act that improved Doodle’s quality of life. However, Brother’s intentions were bad, and he admits his pure selfish objectives when he says "And that Doodle walked only because I was ashamed of having a crippled