Thinking Outside The Box

In Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” he talks about a group of people who are chained together, stuck inside a cave and are starting at the shadows on the cave wall being casted by the fire. The people aren’t there out of their own doing. In Sartre’s “No Exit” he is talking about three people who are trapped inside a room with only themselves. The people are there due to their own doing.


 For Plato, the people represent everybody, society, who is content with not knowing anything except what they are given. People who don’t want to explore and question things for themselves, and find out about different truths. Plato talks about a philosopher during his story, this philosopher, is the one who escapes from the cave and goes outside to see all the different things that there are. When he comes back to tell everybody this, they don’t believe him and think that he is crazy. This is understandable since nobody else has seen the things that he was talking about.


For Sartre’s, the people don’t represent anybody, they are merely there to show a different idea of what hell can be. Instead of being the traditional room filled with instruments of torture, they find out that hell is other people. They demonstrate this idea by arguing with each other so much that one of them tries to kill the other. However they are already dead and they realize that they have to stay with each other in this tiny room.


They are similar because in both cases there are opportunities for the people to escape and leave where they are. However in both cases the people won’t leave. They choose not to leave for different reasons, in “Allegory of the Cave” it is because the people were to afraid to leave and see anything else, other than they already know. In “No Exit” it is because the people in the room were afraid of what the people would think of them.