Plato's Allegory Of The Caves

In Plato’s Allegory of the Caves, a group of prisoners have been confined in a cavern since birth, with no knowledge of the outside world. They are chained, facing a wall, unable to turn their heads, while a fire behind them gives off a faint light. The prisoners see shadows projected on the wall from objects or people passing in front of the fire behind them and give names to the shadows, believing they’re perceiving actual entities. One day a prisoner is freed and is brought outside for the first time. At first, everything is weird and unusual. The sunlight hurts his eyes and his finds the new environment unsettling. But he comes to realize that shadows are only reflections. He finds out that the shadows on the wall were not reality at all. The prisoner returns to the cave to tell the other inmates what he had come to realize and to free them so that they too will realize it but he is blinded by the cave darkness when he reenters the cave and the prisoners think that the journey caused harm instead of joy and would not want to partake in the journey. …show more content…
If you were to see the truth and tried to show or tell them any different, they won’t listen to you. They would rather be stubborn and ignorant than knowledgeable of something because that would mean going out of the cave and seeing the truth. And people would rather live in ignorant bliss than see the painful truth. The cave represents the world and the prisoners are the people in the world. The chains on the prisoners represents ignorance; stopping the prisoners from seeing the truth. The shadows on the walls of the cave represent what people see in the world and the freed prisoner represents those in the society who sees the world without the illusion in