The Road as The Cave of Enlightenment - Research Paper Example

The Road as The Cave of Enlightenment In many ways, it may simply be impossible to tell a new story. Recognizing this, many authors have turned to the old stories for new inspiration in different contexts. In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, for instance, the author has expanded and deepened his understanding of the journey toward enlightenment represented by Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave. As the main character and his son journey from somewhere in the now-ruined United States, perhaps New York, to anywhere in the warmer and perhaps more survivable southern states, one can see some of the journey toward the moral and ethical, the enlightened, man described in Plato’s writing. Plato was himself a disciple of the great philosopher Socrates and much of his understanding of the world was shaped by Socrates’ teachings. Therefore, an understanding of Socrates’ concept of ethics is relevant to learning Plato’s ideas of enlightenment well enough to trace them through McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel. Socrates claimed that a man cannot accurately judge his own capabilities and thus determine his true unique path to the greatest good based on his accurate assessment of his strengths and knowledge of his weaknesses unless he has first taken the time to first know himself through questioning his own beliefs. The mal who has taken the time to know himself from within will then be able to receive instruction from within regarding those things which are good (moral and ethical) and those things which are not. As the man and boy travel through the barren landscape in McCarthy’s novel, the ethics of the boy clearly develop along different lines of reasoning from the ethics of his father, allowing each to discover different paths of inner salvation. This progression becomes clear when one compares McCarthy’s book to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave which discusses exactly this journey of enlightenment. Plato’s allegory begins with all humans living within a dark cave. They are chained in their seats and positioned in such a way that they can only see the blank wall in front of them. Socrates explains within Plato’s story “here they [human beings] have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads” (Kreis 2004). From what they can see, the world is composed of shadows, which are actually shadows of things that are passing behind them, illuminated by a light source they aren’t aware of. What the people know about their world is two dimensional, with no depth or texture. Socrates explains, again within the story, that an individual released from the bonds that bind him and led to the surface “will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows” (Kreis 2004). Even when facing the truth, such a person struggles to reject what they see in preference of what they once knew. However, once this individual is forced to live in a newer light, they will begin to understand their true reality by degrees: “… first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven” (Kreis 2004). Once this acceptance has been reached, Socrates theorized that the person would be very reluctant to return to the cave and would instead take pity on those he had left behind him in the cave. The connection between Plato’s cave and the world introduced at the opening of McCarthy’s novel is almost impossible to miss. It is described as “nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world” (McCarthy 3). Extraterrestrial elements such as the sun, moon and stars have been obscured. Everything on Earth has been burned, reducing the world’s colors to black and grey underneath a ‘sullen’ light that casts only feeble shadows at its peak. There are no animals, no plants and very few people. Of these, most are rightly considered hostile. “The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought” (McCarthy 75). The reduction of the world into only a limited number of possibilities sounds very much like the reduced world of Plato’s cave. As they travel through this darkened world, the man and boy are experiencing the same sort of pain and natural rejection of reality that is described by Socrates. The difference is that, for the man at least, it is the pain of being forced to re-enter the darkness of the cave. His son is enlightened by his father’s confusion. The man’s reluctance to accept the reality before him forces him to feel pity for the young son. This is obvious in the touching scene when he finds the can of Coke. “[H]e put his thumbnail under the aluminum clip on the top of the can and opened it. He leaned his nose to the slight fizz coming from the can and then handed it to the boy. … You drink it … It’s because I won’t ever get to drink another one, isn’t it?” (McCarthy 20). As the man comes to realize, the world he remembers will never be anything more than a fantasy world to his son, a place of unrealizable possibilities for which the son must ultimately pity the father for having lost. In the Allegory of the Cave, Socrates explains that the human beings are watching a giant screen on which marionettes and other things dance, but the humans can only see the shadows of these moving things. The actual colors and nature of these things cannot be perceived from such a perspective, but not having known anything else, Socrates argues that the humans don’t know there’s something to miss: “To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images” (Sahakian, Sahakian 388). This can be compared in a very material sense with the forms of the remaining world that are often recognizable to the father, but have no meaning for the son. Where the father sees a can of Coke and its associated memories, the son sees a round metal cylinder, which could be anything – even something dangerous. McCarthy introduces a particularly poignant symbol of the differences between the forms of the father and those of the son with the finding of the sextant. A sextant is a tool of navigation that utilizes the sun, moon or stars as a light source to find direction (Nova 2002). The man “held it to his eye and turned the wheel. It was the first thing he’d seen in a long time that stirred him” (McCarthy 192). The reason he didn’t bring such a useful tool back for his son to use was because it no longer worked. The sun, permanently hidden behind clouds of ash, could only provide the earth with a diffuse light. Much like the hidden source of light in Plato’s cave, it is incapable of providing direction. In Plato’s dialogue, Socrates explains that when a person journeys from the depths of the cave, he has made an intellectual journey into a higher realm of understanding. Once his eyes become adjusted to the new light, this individual is able to more correctly assess the reality of the world he finds around him by degrees: “… first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven” (Sahakian, Sahakian 388). At the beginning of McCarthy’s book, the narrator tells the reader about the dream the man was having just before he woke up into the grey world of his present reality. In the dream, “he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand” (McCarthy 3) and the light source seems to have been their bodies symbolizing that both individuals are ‘enlightened’ beings. However, the son has no memories of the world his father survived. While it seems clear the father is enlightened because of his experience of the world before, there is no reason why the son should be considered an enlightened being. The son’s enlightenment relates back to Plato’s basic metaphor of adjusting one’s eyes to the light. Intuitively, the son perceives that salvation will only come from finding a way of joining up with other ‘good people’ and beginning the process of rebuilding society. While his father’s goals are simply to keep the two of them alive, the boy realizes that the final destruction of humanity is the loss of human kindness. He finds it increasingly difficult to obey the instructions of his father as they continue south, finally breaking down in tears to force his father to do the right thing for a man who had thought to steal everything they owned. Later that evening, the man tells the boy, “I wasn’t going to kill him” and the boy answers back “But we did kill him” (McCarthy 219). The boy is the leader of the future because his eyes are already adjusted to the light of this new world. Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road is an interesting investigation of Plato’s allegory of the cave from the perspective of an enlightened society being forced to re-enter the darkness of a completely alien and hostile world. Both stories rely on a darkened, two-dimensional world in which options are few, environments are hostile and colorless and light is diffuse and mysterious. Within these worlds, there are items or forms that are equally mysterious and unidentifiable, such as the can of Coke or the sextant. The man, having come from an enlightened world, introduces his son to those things that were missed as is predicted by Plato, but is unable to pass that enlightenment along because it no longer applies to this new world under this new light. Thus the man moves in a reverse direction. However, the boy is moving into a new enlightenment. Like Plato’s enlightened leader, the boy understands the world as it is revealed under his new light and shows promise of finding humanity’s salvation in his mercy and kindness. Works Cited Kreis, Steven. “Plato: The Allegory of the Cave.” May 13, 2004. The History Guide. (April 25, 2010) This source provides a somewhat modernized translation of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”. There is some brief commentary made about the story at the beginning followed by the philosopher’s story beginning in Book 7 of Plato’s The Republic when Socrates mentions human beings living in an underground cave. The segment ends as Socrates begins exploring the ways that guardians should be made. Thus, it includes all of the elements of the cave discussion that are relevant to my comparison of McCarthy’s book The Road to Plato’s allegory of enlightenment. McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. This is the primary source of my work. It is the fictional novel of a man and a boy traveling through a post-apocalyptic America in search of a new home where the boy might survive. As they travel, McCarthy examines the concept of enlightenment as a matter of perspective as he brilliantly regresses mankind into the cave. This work will be compared to Plato’s conceptions of enlightenment. Nova. “How a Sextant Works.” Shackleton’s Voyage of Endurance. Nova. New York: PBS, February 2002. This is a presentation made by PBS that details elements of an old sailing voyage. As part of the discussion, the presentation explains what a sextant is. This is important because it is a significant symbol in the story that helps to shape my argument regarding enlightenment. Sahakian, W. and Sahakian, M. Ideas of the Great Philosophers. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1966. This source provides more information about Plato’s allegory and will be used as a backup source of the allegory and my understanding of it. Read More