The Allegory of the Cave has a constant theme of
ignorance. The prisoners are ignorant to
the real world outside of the cave and are ignorant to the prisoner who escapes
because they do not believe a word he is telling them. The prisoners are pseudo-intellects, and they
are trapped in their own confinements of it.
Because of the prisoners ignorance, they condemn the escapee for trying
to tell them a lie- that the real world contains a sun and that all things that
are seen are real.
Truth is different for all people- the prisoners believe the
images they see on the cave wall are the real objects, not just shadows of cut
outs. Reality, however, is
constant. The escapee must understand
that his truths of reality are not the truths of reality that the prisoners
have. The prisoners believe what they
see is the truth and what they see is real.
The escapee knows that what the prisoners see are merely shadows, but he
does not understand that the shadows are the truth for the prisoners. Neither party understands that they share the
same reality but different truths of it.
Some modern-day interpretations of truth and reality are the A Great and Terrible Beauty trilogy by Libba Bray; when Gemma goes into her other world she knows she is there but sometimes has a hard time going back to her world-to reality. The Inkheart novels by Cornelia Funke also have a theme of distinguishing between truth and reality- characters from novels are read into the real world from the novel they were read from, but humans from Earth have just as hard a time of distinguishing between their world and the fictitious world of the novel. Both novels have aspects of truth within the reality of the novel.
