...from death are the best and Shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends and where the other begins,” Edgar Allen Poe. Edgar Allen Poe has a lot of allegory in most stories he writes like in the House of Usher he had some allegory but in the masque of The Red Death he had quite a bit more Allegory then he did in the House of Usher. The three important Allegory’s in The Masque of The Red Death was The seven rooms, masked stranger and the clock these things are the allegory’s you need to know In order to understand the concept of the story and what they mean so the first thing...
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...According to Greg Johnson Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? is a feminist allegory. I do not know if I agree or disagree with this perspective. I do not think Oates intended for the story to be a feminist allegory in any sense, but I do see why Johnson thinks that way. Connie definitely surrenders her autonomous self to Arnold’s desire and domination in the end, but that does not mean that during the whole story Connie was kissing the ground Arnold walked on. I strongly disagree that part of growing up requires sexual bondage at the hands of a male “friend,” that may be the way Connie ends up but that is definitely not the way most teenage girls mature. I do not think the story is entirely about Connie’s initiation into sexual bondage. It is simply a story about a creepy man that tries to lure in a typical young girl and ultimately interact sexually. According to Larry Rubin Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? is all one big dream about her fear of the adult world. I definitely see why this interpretation is possible. Connie has an overall feeling of not having control over the situation she is in which happens in most bad dreams. Rubin explains the similarities of Arnold to that of which Connie already knows before meeting Arnold, such as his voice is the same as some disc jockey on the radio. This is very common in dreams, things from your real life somehow show up differently in dreams. The fact that Connie could not even dial the phone number when she felt...
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...air you breath, the chair you’re sitting in, even the dreams you have are real as far as you know. Yet, imagine if it wasn’t. Imagine if everything in this world was a lie, not real, just a hallucination of sorts. It would be cruising knowing that everything that we’ve been taught is a lie. To make matters worse, there would be no way to go back and you could only dream of the blissful life that you once lead in a lie of a world. So is ignorance truly bliss? This is a question that both Plato and the Wachowski sibling try to answer in their respective works “Allegory Of The Cave” for Plato and The Matrix trilogy from the Wachowski siblings. In both works, they show us that the road to knowledge from ignorance is fraught with struggle yet does not end once you achieve...
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...Allegory of the Cave “Allegory of the Cave” is a dialog between Socrates and Gloucon in “The Republic” written by Plato. The image of the cave is a universal picture of the human conditions that applies to everyone. It questions the justice created by the society and human nature. The idea conveyed through the dialogue thousands of years ago is so general that examples could be found in today’s society as well. In the beginning Socrates draws the mental image of the cave to his student. The cave is long and dark, but at the opening to the cave you can see some light coming in. In the cave there are humans chained as prisoners facing the wall and who are allowed to turn their heads and look around. They watch the shadows on the wall presented by the puppeteers behind the wall that stands between the burning fire and prisoners. The chained prisoners are happy because they had been fed by the shadows since birth. They have never been outside the cave and they don’t have the desire to go there. However, one prisoner with the help of a wise man like the philosopher liberates himself from the dark cave, sees the puppeteers producing images, and realizes that the shadows in the cave are not real. He also sees the sun which represents the ultimate meaning of life. Since the prisoner must return to the cave after his journey, the truth which he had unveiled is going to change his life. According to the Socrates image of the cave, all humans born in the society are prisoners...
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...The Allegory of the Cave is Plato's explanation of the education of the soul toward enlightenment. He sees it as what happens when someone is educated to the level of philosopher. He contends that they must "go back into the cave" or return to the everyday world of politics, greed and power struggles. The Allegory also attacks people who rely upon or are slaves to their senses. The chains that bind the prisoners are the senses. The fun of the allegory is to try to put all the details of the cave into your interpretation. In other words, what are the models the guards carry? the fire? the struggle out of the cave? the sunlight? the shadows on the cave wall? Socrates, in Book VII of The Republic, just after the allegory told us that the cave was our world and the fire was our sun. He said the path of the prisoner was our soul's ascent to knowledge or enlightenment. He equated our world of sight with the intellect's world of opinion. Both were at the bottom of the ladder of knowledge. Our world of sight allows us to "see" things that are not real, such as parallel lines and perfect circles. He calls this higher understanding the world "abstract Reality" or the Intelligeble world. He equates this abstract reality with the knowledge that comes from reasoning and finally understanding. On the physical side, our world of sight, the stages of growth are first recognition of images (the shadows on the cave wall) then the recognition of objects (the models the guards carry) To understand...
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... The Crucible analysis “We consume our tomorrows fretting about our yesterday”- Persius. There have been moments in history where people were too consumed in fear that they broke many of their morals and due to powerful situations people behaved differently than their normal self. A play called the Crucible was written in 1953 by Author Miller to portray the unfairness at that time due to people being accused of witches with little to no evidence and then hanged. This event was called the Salem witch trials, which took place in the province of Massachusetts Bay. This play is an allegory to the McCarthy Hearings that took place from 1950 to 1956. The McCarthy hearings occurred in 1947; President Truman ordered background checks of every civilian in service to the government due to a fear of people within the United States being a communist spy. The fear of communism intensified when a high ranked official Alger Hiss was convicted of being a communist spy. Senator Joseph McCarthy stepped in and convinced/alarm people within the U.S that there were Communist and Communist sympathizers that would try to overthrow the government. As a result, he formed a special Congressional committee to investigate Americans who were suspected of Communist activities and this movement was named McCarthyism. The Crucible is a play that is universal and enduring because it uses allegory and archetypes to teach readers that fear and panic are the worst forms of chaos in society. People...
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...Thinking as a Hobby vs The Allegory of the Cave Plato’s “Allegory of the cave” was one of the most important allegories of philosophical thought. The first theory of knowledge was Plato. He believed that knowledge was more than just wants in front of you or even what you see but something much greater. He believed there is a reason behind everything and that is part of how you achieve a huge part of knowledge. As for William Golding, he seems to expand on the point of a thought and how thinking is knowledge and power. This comes from his essay “Thinking as a Hobby”. Out of these essays, understand that there is a difference between the act of thinking and thinking itself. It destroys the idea of agreement for one to understand and come to the fact of enlightenment and true reality. The idea behind this all is that Plato has a descriptive idea of the cave, and Golding narrates an idea that matches enlighten or the unenlightened....
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... Professor: Rochelle Rives Course: E101 Date: 10/24/2015 OUR SECOND NATURE Generally, human beings believe they know how the planet ought to rotate, what speed it should rotate on, and where it should rotate to. We are so confident of ourselves that we seem to think to know the truth; we think we are the focal points of the Universe, and everything should revolve around us. It doesn’t matter if the world crashes down, as long as we are unscathed, human existence is not threatened. We are so certain that what we do, how we live, what we eat and what we say is normal and right that we fail to stop for a second to reason why and what is. These things we do have become our second nature, something David Foster Wallace describes as our DEFAULT-SETTINGS. Default-settings are the things we do but never question because we think it is how it is meant to be. It has become an unconscious way of life, like breathing or hearing, we think it is how it should be. They have been hard-wired into our subconscious that our minds are not even aware of them. Among several things, culture is a major default-setting in human beings. The environment we live in, the heritage we inherit, and the ways of life we grew up into has configured our minds to think in specific ways. These make us think that certain things are natural and normal...
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...This is how understanding is interpreted for the person, and how raw knowledge is turned into something more meaningful for the person who learns a new fact. It can be argued that understanding will always require some level of subjectivity. What this means is a fact can not be fully “understood” unless it is put through the filter of a person’s own experience. This is naturally a subjective process. However, without knowledge, understanding could not occur. It is clear that both types of human thinking are important to human development and advancing society that is based on critical reasoning. However, one or the other must be chosen in order to properly answer the question. Therefore, based on the readings, thinking and writing that has been completed so far, it seems that the preferable form of critical thinking is understanding. As far as...
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...Orwell's farm is an allegory because it talks about the animals having a dream to live in an animal paradise and to be freed from humans.At the beginning for example in chapter one, it talks about Mr.Jones and how he treated the animals. Further on old Major the boar which is a wild pig told the animals about a dream that he had. Old Major was described as a 12- year old Majestic pig with a wise and kind appearance.They also described him as a Willingdon beauty.If I'm not mistaken he was the oldest one there at that time he was so highly respected that everyone was willing to lose an hour worth of sleep In order to hear what he had to say.After all the animals have settled in the Barn.Old Major addresses everybody as comrades which are a name...
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...Aylin Vargas English 1301-416 Allegory of the Cave Annotation The son of a wealthy and noble family, Plato (427-347 B.C.) was preparing for a career in politics when the trial and eventual execution of Socrates (399 B.C.) changed the course of his life. He abandoned his political career and turned to philosophy, opening a school on the outskirts of Athens dedicated to the Socratic search for wisdom. Plato's school, then known as the Academy, was the first university in western history and operated from 387 B.C. until A.D. 529, when it was closed by Justinian. Unlike his mentor Socrates, Plato was both a writer and a teacher. His writings are in the form of dialogues, with Socrates as the principal speaker. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato described symbolically the predicament in which mankind finds itself and proposes a way of salvation. The Allegory presents, in brief form, most of Plato's major philosophical assumptions: his belief that the world revealed by our senses is not the real world but only a poor copy of it, and that the real world can only be apprehended intellectually; his idea that knowledge cannot be transferred from teacher to student, but rather that education consists in directing student's minds toward what is real and important and allowing them to apprehend it for themselves; his faith that the universe ultimately is good; his conviction that enlightened individuals have an obligation to the rest of society, and that a good society must be one in...
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...In William Golding’s 1954 award winning novel, Lord of The Flies, Golding introduces religious allegory in many of the characters and many of the scenes within the novel. Not only does Golding depict religious allegory, but so does Harry Hook in his 1990 film, Lord of the Flies. In his film, Hook depicts his interpretation of the novel, and does a very good job at doing so. While the movie consists of a slightly different plot than the book, Harry Hook is also able to insert the ideology that Golding strived to do in his writing. They are both able to depict Simon and Piggy as Jesus-like characters in the sense of truth telling, and the reference of being a martyr. Jack is depicted as a devilish and totalitarian dictator character, and it is...
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...The Theme of Symbolism in Literary Works ENG 125: Introduction to Literature August 1, 2011 The Theme of Symbolism in Literary Works There are many literary works available to discover different themes, such as, symbolism. There are stories of death, love, racism, and much more, and not only that, but they are found in any form of literature from dramas to poems to short stories. However, the symbolism of the “journey of life” is most interesting because most people are drawn to stories that involve human nature, and knowing that they are able to connect to the story or people in the story, on a more emotional or personal level. The poem, The Road Not Taken, and the short story, Used To Live Here Once, are literary works that are both about viewing life from different perspectives. With both of these literary works, the reader is captivated by the mystery of the unknown future, and the challenges of the present from two very different perspectives. The Road Not Taken was written by Robert Frost in 1916, and is a poem about someone making a decision to go down one path versus another, and how taking the “path least traveled” is the best way (Clugston, Sec. 2.2: How Use of Persona Effects Your Response To Literature, para. 4). The symbolism that is being displayed in the poem is that of the literal and physical path that the storyteller is contemplating walking down, against the action of taking a path or making a choice in life. The poem is written in a first...
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...their subscriptions (see the Encyclopedia Britannica for more on the tale's publication history). As a side note – Jackson based "The Lottery" on her life in North Bennington, Vermont (source). Some of us here at Shmoop happen to be from that fine state, and we'd like to assure all potential tourists that despite what you may read in "The Lottery," you don't have to worry about sudden stoning in the Green Mountain State. Anyway, back to the matter at hand. The anonymous, generic village in which "The Lottery" is set, in addition to the vicious twist the story gives to a common American ritual, enhance the contemporary reader's uneasy sense that the group violence in the story could be taking place anywhere and everywhere, right now. Jackson's skillful warping of a popular pastime has become an American classic, establishing her position as one of the great American horror writers. Why Should I Care? So, if you've ever been hanging out with a group of friends and done something truly stupid, you may have heard the refrain, "If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump, too?" Your answer is probably "no," but Shirley Jackson disagrees. She thinks you – and anyone and everyone – would race off that bridge if your community decided it was necessary. According to her, while individuals may be great, a group of people is another animal. An animal that eats its own. "The Lottery" is a story of a small town basically devouring a member of its own community. It's one of...
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...The Lottery Symbolism, Imagery & Allegory Sometimes, there’s more to Lit than meets the eye. The Lottery The lottery is like an 800-pound gorilla of symbols in this story. It's in the title, for Pete's sake. Where do we even begin? Well, let's start with the lottery as a way of upsetting reader expectations. After all, communities across America practice different annual traditions – Easter egg hunts (with origins in early fertility rituals), Christmas tree decorating (check out those patron trees of the Germanic tribes), or July 4th fireworks (well, that one just celebrates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence ...). Anyway, our point is that we're all comfortable with yearly rituals – and it's often not widely known how these celebrations began. See how tradition obscures the history of public ritual? Anyway, back to the lottery. So, we associate lotteries with good things (winning cash prizes!) and annual celebrations also seem pleasant. We talk about this in "What's Up With the Title?" so we'll just say here that, like the blooming, cheerful village itself, there's nothing in the lottery that immediately suggests anything is wrong with this set-up. The lottery is, in fact, operating as an allegory of village life itself: at first, it seems harmless, but then we start to wonder what's going on with all the subdued smiles and piles of stones. So, if the lottery is an allegory of the community, its rules and proceedings must in some way correspond to real-life...
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