OUTLINES FOR ESSAYS (Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave")

The Allegory of the Cave

• There are people who are trapped in a cave
• They have been trapped there for a really long time
• Living in the darkness
• Seeing only shadows
• Then one day one of them gets to leave the cave
• He is blinded by the lights and the reality of what he is able to see,
• the reality that there are actually other things to see besides shadows
• takes him a while to adjust
• once he does, he realizes that he can see the world much better with the light because of what he saw when he was in the cave.

This is about a man learning about the world around him that he had lived in for many years but is now just experiencing it for the first time.