Thinking Outside the Box

Both Plato and Sartre use literary techniques such as allegory and extended metaphor when describing the limitations of our thinking. In Plato's Allegory of the Cave he uses them to compare the similarity prisoners living in a cave have with the ignorance and constraint authority has on society. He uses objects like shackles and shadows to represent distractions and confinements. But in the end it is our free will and desire for something better, the truth. Whereas in Sartre's case with No Exit, he uses extended metaphor to establish the consequences of bad decisions and the limitations that go along with that. He creates an alternate view on hell and its prisoners. In Sartre's story the characters also took advantage of their free will but used it in the wrong way which ultimately ended them their, in hell, for all of eternity.