Allegory Of The Cave Comparison

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A high school student sits in his history class and idly listens while the teacher drones on about Christopher Columbus. The student thought he already knew everything he needed to know: Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, he discovered America, and eventually the first Thanksgiving happened. Suddenly, the teacher starts to share new information that the boy had never heard and the teacher’s words pulled him out of his daydream. The new perspective she gave contradicted his past knowledge. Everything he had known before this time contained only lies. This same experience happened in both Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” and the popular movie The Matrix by Andy Wachowski. For years now, the two works have been compared and many come to the same conclusion. While The Matrix and “The Allegory of the Cave” posses differences such as the setting, point of view, and tone the similarities they share throughout their plot, characters, and symbols show that …show more content…
The Matrix starts with a scene of a metatropolis area in 1999. As the movie progresses and the story takes off, the setting changes to fake worlds within The Matrix and the hovercraft “Nebuchadnezzar.” Most of the story takes place in a completely futuristic setting. Eventually, viewers are giving a scene showing what the world has come to after the Artificial Intelligence (AI) took over. While reading “The Allegory of the Cave” an image of Plato giving a lecture to a student, Glaucon, appears in the reader’s head. Not only is the overall setting different, but the setting of the story Plato tells differs as well. Plato does an outstanding job of setting a scene of “... human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light… have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move… Above and behind them a fire is blazing…” (Plato 284) This is entirely different setting than a dystopian world that The Matrix
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