These people can be considered to be the prisoners in Plato’s analogy, chained together, facing a blank wall, assuming to know everything about the world from the small part of it they’ve seen. They know nothing of the world outside their town, they know it’s there, but they don’t understand it. These people are happy enough to live in the dark, as it were, with little or no education about life outside the town’s boundaries. Plato says that as long as we are enthralled by what we see and have knowledge of, we will never be able to consider other abstract ideas we don’t understand. The allegory teaches us about enlightenment, and how if we can be philosophers we can be free.
The Stranger Essay Albert Camus novels The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus are based to define the meaning of existentialism. In The Stranger the main character Meursault is portrayed to show no emotions and judgments towards others. While The Myth of Sisyphus shows who lives his life in a stubbornly and arrogant behavior as if he’s out to get someone in life. In both stories the readers that they have taken life and for granted and come to sort of realize their wrongs at the end of the story. Neither understands having though, passion, feeling, or emotion in life.
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.
In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the scenario begins by describing a cave inhabited by three prisoners who have been chained and held immobile since childhood; not only are their limbs held in place, but their heads are also fixed, which compels them to gaze at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire and between the fire and prisoners is a walkway, along which people walk carrying things on their heads including figurines of men and animals. The chained up prisoners interpret the shadows cast on the cave wall to be as real. Eventually a prisoner is released from the cave and permitted to be let out to see the outside world such as a river, the sun, the stars and begins to discover the ultimate truth. When the ‘enlightened’ prisoner returns to the cave and voices to the other prisoners how the shadows are not the reality they seem; he is brutally kicked to death by his fellow prisoners.
In Plato’s “Allegory of a Cave” Socrates and Glaucon discuss an insightful circumstance of men in a cave that are chained to a wall with the entrance of the cave to their backs. While conversing over this topic Socrates relates truth/reality with justice. In doing so he uses the men in the cave as the prime example in the allegory of truth and reality; the men do not know that there is an outside world. The men base their beliefs on the shadows that are portrayed on the wall in front of them. To them, these mere shadows are their own truths to the outside world as they have not seen anything from the exterior.
This sense of isolation and loneliness that Bradbury represent connotes what his vision of 2026 will be like. Furthermore, this dark and “empty” place connotes the amount of damage mankind made and also makes us realize that we should be scared of ourselves. This unusual house that seemed to be very active, on August 2026 was dead. There were “no doors slamming, no carpets taking the soft thread of rubber heals”; the use of the repetition of the negative diction ‘no’ gives this tone of denial and demonstrates how lifeless the house was. This vision that Bradbury has of the future represents that he is certain that when a bomb occurs, the world will come to an end and the last one standing will be technology.
The theme in any work of literature is the underlying idea and main purpose (Kirszner, and Mandell 4). One such theme that has been rewritten throughout time is the idea of death and its inevitability. It is an interesting subject that has been revisited by many authors and poets, and has a great range of perception. Writers find a way to explain a concept and a truth that they believe through different forms of literature. Everything from a three line haiku to a 1000 page novel has an underlying theme.
Imagine a world where there is no choice and your whole life is set out for you by the law. This is the reality in the texts Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and Gattaca by Andrew Niccol. Composers Bradbury and Niccol use contrast, theme and characterisation to convey to their audience that no matter what situation you are in you have the power of choice. In the novel Fahrenheit 451 the protagonist Guy Montag lives in a society that is heavily controlled and censored. Books are banned in their society to prevent all discord and unhappiness but that causes the opposite effect with Montag.
Theme and Narrative Elements in the Short Story December Winters ENG 125 Prof. Elizabeth Hoyle September 26, 2008 There are numerous literary elements that play a role in short stories in order to add to the larger narrative theme. An example of this is the narrative "The Welcome Table” by Alice Walker. Throughout this paper, this writer will demonstrate the significance of how the application of point of view, setting, and symbolism plays a role contributing the theme of a story. "The Welcome Table" by Alice Walker is narrated from the third person omniscient point of view. Walker's description of the main character is so vividly expressed that it is difficult for the reader to visualize anything other than that of a poverty-stricken and destitute individual.
In this paper we will try to answer one of the most controversial questions: Why should we defend literature? But in order to answer this question we need first to have a clear concept of what literature is. All throughout history there have been as many definitions of literature as scholars that have attempted to define it. Literature comes from the Latin word “litterae” that means “letters”, and this comes from the Greek “ grammatike”, that is, instruction or knowledge related to the act of writing and reading. This meaning was accepted up to the middle of the XVIII Century and it was applied to pieces of writing that belonged to different fields such as philosophy, history and religion.