Allegory of a Cave and Matrix Comparison Essay

When you think of the world that Alice Liddell fell into and believed to be true, you might think she was a lunatic living in an imaginary world. Yet if you really think about it, how do you know that her world isn’t genuine, and ours simply an illusion that veils our eyes from the reality? Who’s to say what’s real, and what isn’t? There are two very different, yet eerily the same stories that expand on the ideas of reality, and the truth that is found within it. One, a modern movie, called The Matrix, where a man learns that his race is being controlled by a robotic race. The human race lives in a simulated world, where they are ignorant of the world that lies outside their imprisoned minds. The other a classical essay written by Plato, called “The Allegory of the Cave.” In the essay, Plato entertains the idea, of what prisoners who are raised in a cave, where all they can know to be true is shadows on a large wall that they gaze at their entire lives. They contrast in many ways, yet over the centuries since Plato’s time, the theme of his essay still applies. One of the finest points that Plato made in his essay, was that if a man were to gaze at shadows all his life, the man would surely believe this to be reality. “To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.” This quote defines what humans see as reality. It shows that what we see, we know to be true. Plato wanted his apprentice to consider the option, that maybe what we know to be true is in fact a lie. The Matrix also relays this concept to the modern day world. Morpheus states, “The Matrix is a computer generated dreamworld.” This Dream-world is much like the shadow images that the prisoners in Plato’s cave experienced. The People in both believed the deception that veiled them from the truth to be real. When in fact their reality was far from the truth, this represents the knowledge a human gets in life. If a person only learns of shadows his entire life, when