Thinking Outside the Box

Both Plato and Sartre describe the limitations of our thinking with very descriptive sort of "real life" senarios. They use descriptive stories-Plato with the prisoners in the cave unable to see around them, and Sartre with the three dead people in hell-to try and expand their reader's thinking. Plato uses the whole metaphor of the "cave" and "prisoners" to imply that our minds are covered by what we think we see and what we want to believe instead of seeing the reality of things. This really makes the reader think, may I say, "outside the box", because we don't necessarily think about this really at all. Sartre describes his hell as a typical place where three normal people meet. Yet, within the simple text, there is an extended allegory with a hidden message: we are not tortured by any specific labeled "torturers", but by the things and people around us that make us hate everything. There are things in life that just make us tick. With Sartre's story, he created a dinamic story to expand the reader's thinking into what our hell would really be. Both of there extended metaphors and allegories create a very broad range of thinking for their readers.