The Allegory of the Cave from Plato

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The Allegory of the Cavefrom Platos Republic
(380 BC)
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What is an Allegory?

• an extended metaphor
• the underlying meaning has moral, social,
  religious, or political significance, and
  characters are often personifications of abstract
  ideas such as charity or ignorance
• a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and
  a symbolic meaning

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• Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more
  gray each one than what had gone before ... He
  pushed away the tarpaulin and raised himself in
  the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward
  the east for any light but there was none. In
  the dream from which hes wakened he had wandered
  in a cave where the child led him by the hand.
  Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls.
  Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost
  among the inward parts of some granitic
  beast. - page 3

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• Hundreds of nights theyd sat up debating the
  pros and cons of self destruction with the
  earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse
  wall. - page 58

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(No Transcript)
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• allegory of the cave - clay figures

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Application to The Road

• What is the cave?
• Who is the prisoner chained in the cave?
• Who is the prisoner who is freed?
• What is the sun / light?

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Setting

• cave-like
• dark
• closed-in feeling
• difficult to see

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Characters

• Father
• remains in the cave
• unable to see the light / truth
• focuses on the past through dreams
• which are a false sense of reality

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• Son
• has knowledge of the light / truth
• tries to lead the man to the light /
• truth
• refuses to acknowledge his dreams