Thinking Outside the Box

Both the “Allegory of the Cave” by Plato and “No Exit” by Sartre express the idea of limitations on the human mind. In Plato’s work, we see that people are limited to new knowledge because of themselves. They are too afraid to leave their comfort zone and explore what’s out there. We tend to go with the flow and limit ourselves. In “No Exit” the characters’ thinking is limited because they are isolated. They go with what they already know and listen to others’ opinions and thoughts. They see that as their only way of new knowledge.
Plato’s allegory uses dialogue that tells a story to illustrate his ideas, while Sartre uses an actual conversation between a few characters in order to set a specific tone and express the theme. In the “Allegory of the Cave” the people are limited to their thoughts not by force, but because they choose to. The “shackles” in the story represent the characters themselves. Even after the man who had escaped came back to teach them, they still refused. The scenario isn’t that they can’t understand, but that they themselves refuse to learn and understand. They set their own limitations. On the other hand, the people in “No Exit” have actual limitations. They can only learn from what’s in their surroundings. For example when Garcin was told he was ugly by Estelle, he had to go by others’ opinions and his memory on whether to believe it or not.
The major difference between these two stories is that the prisoners in the cave refused to think and lived a dull life being intrigued by shadows. In “The Exit”, the characters think about their situation and tried to escape the room which was symbolic of their position. Plato and Sartre’s works share the same idea about the limitations on the human mind. Their obvious distinction is that in one story the limitations are caused by the people themselves, and in the other the restrictions are made by other uncontrolled reasons.