Cave

While reading about Mrs. Moore's experience in the Marabar cave, I thought of a number of things, one of which was Plato's cave theory.

Plato used a cave to explain man's perception of reality. Picture this:

A group of people are sitting in chairs, facing the back wall of a cave. All they can see are the shadows cast from things moving outside the entrance to the cave. However, they are unaware of the entrance, and believe the shadows to be reality. They attempt to explain these shadows, and become very comfortable with their explanations.

However, once in a while, one person will turn around in their chair, and see that there is an opening in the cave. He will then alert the rest of the group, and he will be labelled as crazy and become ostracized from the group.

Once in a great, great while, one person will get up from his chair and walk outside of the cave. He will come back and tell the rest of the group about all that he has seen, and about the existence of an entire world outside the cave.

Upon hearing this, the group will kill him.

I thought of this allegory when I read about the terrifying echo of the caves. All of man's ideas and even his habits are taken by the cave and turned into "boum." "Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce 'boum' " (147).

Throughout history, man has attempted to fight ignorance. We hate not knowing why something is the way it is. It seems to me that the cave symbolizes a sort of ignorance - a death of philosophy and explanations: "But suddenly, at the edge of [Mrs. Moore's] mind, Religion appeared, poor little talkative Christianity, and she knew that all its divine words from 'Let there be Light' to 'It is finished' only amounted to 'boum' " (150).