Starting with Cronin's perception that the author regularly recycles the "
parable of the cave" (15) and with Delrez's argument that the conquered surfaces of our reality are "signposted with the markers of an external dimension felt to exist beyond the frame of representation" (141), we could easily imagine that, in Frame, those who live by the rules of conquered surfaces dwell in the shadow world, Plato's cave.
--Mary Gordon, "The
parable of the Cave; or, In Praise of Watercolors" in The Writer on Her Work
Plato's
parable of the cave defines the upward mobility of the unlearned to the learned and thereby symbolically defines education as an entire system.
She reads the
parable of the cave from The Republic to demonstrate how illusory is Jacob's education in the Greek classics, and the Phaedrus to reveal the elegiac quality of that education.
It's like when Plato's character emerges from the cave into the realm of knowledge and can never go back again once he has seen the light in the
Parable of the Cave. That's what Honors did for me.
On the first day of some literature classes, I hand out a copy of Plato's "
Parable of the Cave" (sometimes called "The Allegory of the Cave").