Richard Wright's Allegory Of The Cave And The Man Who Lived Underground

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Is there a truer higher reality than what most people experience? This question can best be answered by examining the protagonist in both Allegory of the Cave by Plato and The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright. The answer to this question, is very complex as it includes the definition of reality, how to measure the terms truer and higher, and the consensus of people’s experiences. because there is no way to prove that there is a truer higher reality beyond what most people experience, this statement is false. While there are multiple definitions of reality, the most accurate is the world or the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them. This means not how we see things or are prospective but how things really are. Reality is unbiased platform that isn’t defined to a specific person. It does not depend on any one-person experience but what is there. …show more content…

In the Allegory of the Cave, there is a group of prisoners chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. One prisoner is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not reality at all. Although the prisoners were experiencing something different than what was happening outside the cave, they were still in the same reality as the people outside the cave. In the Man Who Lived Underground, Fred Daniels, a young black man unjustly accused of murdering a woman, is forced into signing a confession. He escapes from the police by going underground into the sewer system beneath the

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