Comparing the Search in Platos Allegory of the Cave and...

The Search for Truth in Platos Allegory of the Cave and Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio The novel Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson has many themes that present themselves throughout the book. One such recurring theme is a search for truth. The characters in the book do not fully realize that they are searching for truth, but they do feel a vague, indescribable thing that pushes and prods their minds to actualize a higher plane of thought. This search for a higher plane by the characters of Winesburg nearly parallels another literary work of ancient Greek origin- Platos Allegory of the Cave, which is a portion of his famous writing The Republic. I contend that the town of Winesburg is the equivalent of the Cave in Platos†¦show more content†¦Life for the prisoners goes on this way without occurrence until one of them is freed, led up outside the cave, and shown the real world. The freed person will realize that the truth of the shadowed reality is actually a falsehood. After this realization the person who visited the upper world is returned to imprisonment in the cave. Her eyes have to adjust to the darkness of the cave once again. However, this adjustment naturally takes a long time. As a result, the once free person can no longer see the shadows as well as she did before her release into the upper world. To the people who have remained in the cave, it seems as though going into the upper world has destroyed her faculty for seeing reality. Some of the captives then say that trying to reach the outer world is harmful, and that anyone caught trying to loose themselves or another person for the purpose of reaching the outside will be punished. Plato says that the cave symbolizes the world of sight and the outside represents the world of knowledge. Plato also instructs people to interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world. Platos belief is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears, and that humans should strive to reach this goodness through philosophical thought. The connection between Winesburg, Ohio and the Allegory of the Cave presents itself in the very first passage, The Book of the Grotesque. In this first