9/3/2023 0 Comments Allegory of the cave drawingThough Henry James's masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady is not mentioned among these novels written by different writers in different periods, I will try to show that the allegory is an apt tool when analyzing Isabel Archer's character, the protagonist of the novel. Plato's famous allegory was employed while analyzing a number of famous literary pieces like Gulliver's Travels, Wings, The Man Who Lived Underground, and The Bluest Eye. This paper seeks to identify the central analogical function of the fire in the cave, following out various hints and suggestions in Plato's rather dark text. While there is some scholarly unanimity on most of the details of the cave analogy, there is one detail that no one has yet explored, viz., the significance of the fire in the cave. The description of the cave, moreover, is rather extended, going on for four Stephanus pages (roughly, 514-518), and Plato presumably has reasons for indulging in such fine detail. 1 When it comes to the cave image, again, we find a careful sort of delineation. Although there is some disagreement about just what this proportionality in the line may mean, commentators agree that the proportionality has some significance. ![]() The divided line, for example, features exact proportions precisely specified. In Republic, many of the images Plato appeals to are very carefully constructed and meticulously described. However, our hunger for comprehensive representation can be satisfied either by sophistic misrepresentations or by genuine nous, and Plato presents us with a choice: How will we use the fire burning inside us? I explain escape from the cave by appeal to the ascent passage from Symposium, and I suggest that question whether the prisoners' release from their chains is voluntary or compelled is a false dilemma. ![]() Hunger for understanding is the source of illumination for things in the mind, but also, it is the ground of the being of representations in the mind. I argue that the fire represents the human longing for synoptic understanding. The sun outside the cave is the ground of everything outside the cave, and thus, the fire must have some parallel crucial role to play inside the cave.
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