Allegory of the Cave and the Monomyth

Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" depicted a story of a man born in darkness who is allowed to ascend to light and must then venture back into the dark in order to raise his fellow men with him.  The allegory of the enlightened men and his journey follows Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey almost exactly.

In the allegory, the men are born in a dark cave and, having been there all their lives, have a skewed view of reality.  Because it is all they know, however, to them, this view is not merely a view of reality, but reality itself.  In their reality, the shadows that they see are not representations of the object but the objects themselves.  The hero of the allegory, the man that eventually escapes the darkness, is also born in the dark cave.

The man's first realization occurs when he is allowed to turn his head and see that the shadows were, like their namesake, nothing more than shadows of wooden carvings cast upon the wall by a blazing fire behind them.  In this moment, the man realizes that his entire perception of reality as well as his fellow men's entire perception of reality has been completely fabricated.  In their reality, the shadows were all there was, but his knowledge of the fire proofs to him that the shadows were a skewed perception of reality that he has accepted all of his life.  This realization is similar to the hero's realization that the hero's mundo world is a poor representaiton of the real world.  This revelation is the hero's call to action as he must now embark on  a journey to reveal the truth.

After he realized that his old reality was fake, the man ascends the steps of the cave into the outside world.  His ascends into the light, leaving the cave and his fellow prisoners.  The man leaves all that he'd ever known to explore the greater truth outside of his cave.  This ascent is the transition the hero must make from the mundane world to the supernatural world.  In this journey, the hero must travel through uncertainty and leave behind and escape his own subconciousness and ideas of truth inorder to explore the truth of the outside world.  As he comes closer to the light, he crosses the threshold between his world and the extraordinary world where all of his knowledge is proven useless.

Up on the surface, however, the man begins to truly see for the first time.  The light of the sun allows him to wholly see the world.  The man slowly captures the essence of the world that now surrounds him.  From the shadows to the reflections to the objects themselves, he grows accustomed to the upper world.  After a while, he gazes upon the sun and through his knowledge of the sun, he now understands the truths of the world.  In the allegory, the sun represents the source of knowledge and the ultimate prize that the hero is rewarded with as he completes his journey.  It is this treasure that the hero must now bring back to the mundane world to better it as a whole.

In the closing scene of the allegory, however, the man returns to the cave and is now an outcast.  Because of his vision of the light and knowledge of the world, he is not longer able to see the shadows clearly.  The prisoners, because of their limited view of reality, considers the man's enlightenment a burden and that he is now blind to their reality.  This is similar to the situation where the gold or treasure the hero brings back turns into ashes.  This means the treasure or knowledge the hero achieved is worthless in the mundane world as the people of the mundane world lack understanding.  The allegory concludes that it is the enlightened one's responsibility to, despite of the possiblity of death, help his fellow men see the light and raise them from the cave in which they are trapped.