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Allegory Of The Cave And Young Goodman Brown

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What makes realistic art, be it any form of art e.g. literature, paintings, sculptures? Art as a whole is based on relation to an individual or to a society. In the focus of visions of realism a common theme in short stories relating to realism is that the idea of something being ‘real’ might not actually be real. The point of this idea is to convey that individual thought is created from one's own environment and community. This idea is seen in several short stories such as The. The idea that humans are assimilated into groups or communities from which they originate is evident in the short stories “Allegory of the Cave” by Plato and “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The allegory described in Allegory of the Cave is that humans …show more content…

This short story is characterized by the main character being led astray from the path that society had set for him to follow the ethics and ideas of a puritan society. He remains oblivious to the idea that everyone around him is a sinner while remaining in the presence of society, this is seen in the mention that “My father never went into the woods on such an errand, nor his father before him. We have been a race of honest men and good Christians, since the days of the martyrs. And shall I be the first of the name of Brown, that ever took this path and kept’”(Hawthorne 2), Brown is under the impression that he himself is the only sinner in the entire town of people this occurs because the community from which he was born and from which he was raised as successfully convinced him to fear sin, and that if he does sin he will be the sole sinner amongst a society of pure people. This fear of isolation caused Brown to resist temptation to sin for the majority of his life, though this also kept him from thinking independently outside of the ideas that the community thrust upon him. When Brown finally does stray from the ideas of the community he begins to realize that he lives amongst sinners, and no one is pure amongst them, “‘There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil! For to thee is the world give’”(Hawthorne 5). This idea is important because it demonstrates the idea that despite individuals changing, the community remains the same. This in turn means that the ideals of a community can be based on fallacies and it is imperative for the individual to question every idea to fully understand its implications and

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