Similarities Between The Matrix And The Allegory Of The Cave

Allegories are, as many would say, “as old as time,” and rightly so. Known to use symbols to portray veiled messages, allegories have been used in a plethora of stories, including Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave,” which is a short story written in Ancient Grecian times, and the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix, which is a movie produced in 1999. In “The Allegory of the Cave,” three prisoners are chained in a cave. In that cave, there are moving shadows that the prisoners perceive as real. This goes on until one man is released into the real world, where he has difficulty accepting the fact that the shadows in the cave that he understood were real, are only illusions. When he returns to the cave to reveal what he has learned, the other prisoners get angry and threaten to kill him. The Matrix bears a similar
All allegories use symbols to convey hidden meanings. The Matrix uses symbols to convey its hidden meaning, which is similar to that of The Allegory of the Cave’s. Therefore, the movie The Matrix is a modern version of “The Allegory of the Cave.” As understood in the first paragraph, “The Allegory of the Cave” is about an imprisoned man who, all his life, thinks that the shadows in the cave are his reality. Eventually, when he is released into the real world, he realizes that what he perceived in the cave is not actually real. The Matrix shares this message, but instead of a literal cave, which symbolizes fantasy and ignorance, a digital world is utilized. Both stories, despite the usage of different symbols, still convey the same meanings with those symbols. Hence, the symbol of the cave and the digital world are parallel to each