Early Essay Analytical Response

After reading a few essays this semester, from my point of view, we have read a couple very interesting, thought provoking essays, and a few that just didn't 'float my boat'. The best essay we have read so far, to me anyways, was Plato's essay "The Allegory Of The Cave", as it was by far the most thought provoking, and could be interpreted in many different ways.

In some of the discussions in class, we experienced a couple points of view. This makes it very easy to then talk about this essay, as we were able to bounce our ideas off others, and hear a second way of thinking. When I first read the essay to myself, the message I gathered from it was a very religious symbolic theme to the essay. As Socrates tells his student about this 'cave' and how the people in the cave are in the dark, I automatically thought of religion. Being a Christian myself, I took the light, that the prisoner saw after escaping his cave, as coming to understand, believe, and love God. Socrates then proceeds to comment on how it would be impossible for the prisoner to return to the darkness and live the same way that he did before his encounter with 'the light', and for most Christians, it would be literally impossible to start living life without even a small thought of God.

While discussing this in our class, other students suggested the idea of the light representing knowledge and comprehension, as opposed to my opinion of a religious theme. This other way of interpreting this piece of literature then gets everyone thinking of which theme was intended by Plato, not which is right or wrong, because on an essay such as this, there shouldn't be a right and wrong answer.

The essay kept my interest in many ways. The first was the use of the dialogue between Socrates and his student. This dialogue kept a structured feel to the essay, and also helped split up Socrates' ideas and questions. Although the student never said much, it was very beneficial for the essay to include his dialogue. A second factor that helped keep my attention to the essay, although very simple, was the fact that Socrates was in it. This seems like a silly reason to be interested in a piece of writing, but I knew that as soon as I saw the name Socrates that this essay was going to have me thinking. Accompanying these thoughts that were, essentially, started by the single name of Socrates, the title of the essay has an obvious hint at what the essay will be about, as the word 'allegory' simply means that there are two different meanings to, in this case, the cave. This thinking, accompanied by the exercise of drawing our own cave, let my imagination flow, which can help make any piece of writing much more interesting and enjoyable.

This essay was very enjoyable to read, discuss, and more importantly dissect, and it makes me wish that the essay was longer. It has me wanting to read more of the same, or very similar essays that make you look deeper than just the obvious surface meaning. I truly hope that we can read more essays like this as a class so that I, as a student, can learn to extend my thinking and comprehension of amazing works of literature.