Plato's Cave, By Jose Saramago

Plato’s Cave is a story about a group of people and their perceived reality. In this story, there are many people that have been chained to a wall of the caves for their entire lives. All they can see is a blank wall that has shadows projected on it. These shadows are the prisoners’ reality because that is the only thing that they see. There is one prisoner that is freed and learns what true reality it. The Cave, a novel by Jose Saramago, is a tale about a society where the Center controls many aspects of a person’s life, so residents in the city are caught up in that corporate, capitalistic world, making it their reality. There are parallels of this story to Plato’s cave: the Center is the cave, capitalism is the shadow on the blank wall,
Cipriano Algor, a potter, is the one of the few people who manages to escape from that world by realizing the impact of such an environment on a person. In The Cave, Saramago undermines capitalism, a system controlled by private, selfish desires for profit, by repeatedly rewarding Cipriano when he gives away his pottery, suggesting that people should act on their humanity rather than to seek a profit.
After the Center only takes half of their original order, Cipriano gives bowls and plates to a man that attempted to help him, displaying his humanity. Most people in the Center favor the plastic imitations of earthenware because they last longer and are more durable, decreasing the demand for Cipriano’s pottery. After he finds out the news of the decreased desire for earthenware, he heads home. He begins to feel purposeless since the art he spent his whole life perfecting is no longer needed; therefore, Algor wants to get robbed. After waiting for over an hour in a bad part of the city, a man walks towards the van. Cipriano thinks that the man is a thief. Instead, the man asks if Algors’s van is stuck, and if he needs assistance pushing