In his extended metaphor, “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato describes a conversation between his brother, Glaucon, and Socrates about the difficulty of understanding reality. Behind these prisoners are puppeteers who hold a puppet-show using the shadows of the fire behind them. The prisoners can only see the shadows casted by the puppeteers and they can only hear the sound of echoes from behind. For their whole lives, they are only accustomed to see these shadows in the shape of fake objects such as trees and animals.
One of the prisoners is released from the chain and he experiences a whole new world that he has never encountered before. What he had thought was a tree was no longer the same tree that he had known before.There, he is exposed to sunlight and reality hits him. In this allegory, the prisoners represent people in society. This inlalcludes all people, no malaatter what race they are, what social class they are in, and also what gender they are. We are locked in the cave and we are the ones who can only see what is shown on the wall, unless we open the the our eyes to new experiences.
Similarly to prisoner that was blinded the the by the strong light outside, we also need to challenge ourselves to new ideas and maybe be blinded by the light to see a new view In Abercrombie’s words, the man only had the schema of what was shown on the cave wall, which caused him to have a very limited storehouse of knowledge.
