Jos

Saramago

Jos Saramago
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Born
Died
Occupation
Nationality
Ethnicity
Period
Notable
work(s)
Notable
award(s)
Spouse(s)

Jos de Sousa Saramago

16 November 1922
Azinhaga, Santarm, Portugal
18 June 2010 (aged 87)
Tas, Lanzarote Island, Spain
Novelist
Playwright
Portuguese
Caucasian
1947 2010
Death with Interruptions; The Gospel
According to Jesus Christ; Blindness;
Cain
Nobel Prize in Literature
1998
Pilar del Rio (m. 1988)

Influences[show]

Signature

www.josesaramago.org/saramago/
Jos de Sousa Saramago, GColSE (Portuguese pronunciation: [uz smau]; (16 November 1922 18 June
2010) was a Portuguese novelist, poet, playwright, journalist and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature.
His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic
events, emphasizing the human factor. Harold Bloom has described Saramago as "a permanent part of the
Western canon".[2]
Awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature,[3] more than two million copies of Saramago's books have been
sold in Portugal alone and his work has been translated into 25 languages.[4][5] He founded the National Front for
the Defence of Culture (Lisbon, 1992) with Freitas-Magalhes and others. A proponent of libertarian

communism,[6] Saramago came into conflict with some groups, such as the Catholic Church. Saramago was an
atheist who defended love as an instrument to improve the human condition.
In 1992, the Portuguese government, under Prime Minister Anbal Cavaco Silva, ordered the removal of The
Gospel According to Jesus Christ from the European Literary Prize's shortlist, claiming the work was
religiously offensive. Disheartened by this political censorship of his work,[7] Saramago went into exile on the
Spanish island of Lanzarote, upon which he resided until his death in 2010.[8][9]
At the time of his death, Saramago was married to Spanish journalist Pilar del Rio, and had a daughter from a
previous marriage.[9] The European Writers Parliament came about as a result of a joint proposal by Saramago
and Orhan Pamuk; Saramago was expected to speak as the guest of honour at the EWP however he died before
its opening ceremony in 2010.[10]

Early and middle life

Saramago was born in 1922 into a family of landless peasants in Azinhaga, Portugal, a small village in Ribatejo
Province some hundred kilometers northeast of Lisbon.[8] His parents were Jos de Sousa and Maria de Piedade.
"Saramago", a wild herbaceous plant known in English as the wild radish, was his father's family's nickname,
and was accidentally incorporated into his name upon registration of his birth.[8] In 1924, Saramago's family
moved to Lisbon, where his father started working as a policeman. A few months after the family moved to the
capital, his brother Francisco, older by two years, died. He spent vacations with his grandparents in Azinhaga.
When his grandfather suffered a stroke and was to be taken to Lisbon for treatment, Saramago recalled, "He
went into the yard of his house, where there were a few trees, fig trees, olive trees. And he went one by one,
embracing the trees and crying, saying good-bye to them because he knew he would not return. To see this, to
live this, if that doesn't mark you for the rest of your life," Saramago said, "you have no feeling."[11] Although
Saramago was a good pupil, his parents were unable to afford to keep him in grammar school, and instead
moved him to a technical school at age 12. After graduating, he worked as a car mechanic for two years. Later
he worked as a translator, then as a journalist. He was assistant editor of the newspaper Dirio de Notcias, a
position he had to leave after the democratic revolution in 1975.[8]
After a period of working as a translator he was able to support himself as a writer. Saramago married Ilda Reis
in 1944. Their only child, Violante, was born in 1947.[8] From 1988 until his death in June 2010 Saramago was
married to the Spanish journalist Pilar del Ro, who is the official translator of his books into Spanish.[8]

Later life and international acclaim

Saramago did not achieve widespread recognition and acclaim until he was sixty, with the publication of his
fourth novel, Memorial do Convento (literally, Memoir of the Convent). A baroque tale set during the Inquisition
in 18th-century Lisbon, it tells of the love between a maimed soldier and a young clairvoyant, and of a renegade
priest's heretical dream of flight. The novel's translation in 1988 as Baltasar and Blimunda, by Giovanni
Pontiero, brought Saramago to the attention of an international readership.[8][12] This novel won the Portuguese
PEN Club Award.
He became a member of the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969 and remained so until the end of his life.[13]
Saramago was also an atheist[14] and self-described pessimist.[15] His views have aroused considerable
controversy in Portugal, especially after the publication of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.[16] Members of
the country's Catholic community were outraged by Saramago's representation of Jesus and particularly God as
fallible, even cruel human beings. Portugal's conservative government would not allow Saramago's work to
compete for the European Literary Prize,[8] arguing that it offended the Catholic community. As a result,
Saramago and his wife moved to Lanzarote, an island in the Spanish Canaries.[17]

Nobel Prize

Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. The announcement came when he was about to
fly to Germany ahead of the Frankfurt Book Fair, and caught both him and his editor by surprise.[8] The Nobel
committee praised his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony", and his "modern skepticism"
about official truths.[12]

Style and themes

Saramago at Teatro Jorge Elicer Gaitn in Bogot in 2007.

Saramago's experimental style often features long sentences, at times more than a page long. He uses periods
sparingly, choosing instead a loose flow of clauses joined by commas.[8] Many of his paragraphs extend for
pages without pausing for dialogue, (which Saramago chooses not to delimit by quotation marks); when the
speaker changes, Saramago capitalizes the first letter of the new speaker's clause. His works often refer to his
other works.[8] In his novel Blindness, Saramago completely abandons the use of proper nouns, instead referring
to characters simply by some unique characteristic, an example of his style reflecting the recurring themes of
identity and meaning found throughout his work.
Saramago's novels often deal with fantastic scenarios, such as that in his 1986 novel The Stone Raft, in which
the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the rest of Europe and sails around the Atlantic Ocean. In his 1995 novel
Blindness, an entire unnamed country is stricken with a mysterious plague of "white blindness". In his 1984
novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (which won the PEN Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction
Award), Fernando Pessoa's heteronym survives for a year after the poet himself dies. Additionally, his novel
Death with Interruptions (also translated as Death at Intervals) takes place in a country in which, suddenly,
nobody dies, and concerns, in part, the spiritual and political implications of the event, although the book
ultimately moves from a synoptic to a more personal perspective.
Using such imaginative themes, Saramago addresses the most serious of subject matters with empathy for the
human condition and for the isolation of contemporary urban life. His characters struggle with their need to
connect with one another, form relations and bond as a community, and also with their need for individuality,
and to find meaning and dignity outside of political and economic structures.
When asked to describe his daily writing routine in 2009, Saramago responded, "I write two pages. And then I
read and read and read."[18]

Politics

Saramago by Portuguese painter Carlos Botelho.

Saramago was a proponent of anarcho-communism,[6] and a member of the Communist Party of Portugal.[9] As a
member of his PCP he stood for the 1989 Lisbon Local election in the list of the Coalition "For Lisbon" and was
elected Alderman and presiding officer of the Municipal Assembly of Lisbon.[19] Saramago was also a candidate
of the Democratic Unity Coalition to the European Parliament in all the elections from 1989 to 2009, usually in
positions with no possibility of being elected.[19] Saramago was a critic of the European Union and the
International Monetary Fund.[8]
In his novel Blindness, the communist principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his
need is stated in a positive light.[20] In a 2008 press conference for the filming of Blindness he stated, in
reference to the global financial crisis, that "Marx was never so right as now"[21]
Although many of his novels are acknowledged political satire of a subtle kind, it is in The Notebook that
Saramago makes his political convictions most clear. The book, written from a Marxist perspective, is a
collection of his blog articles for the year September 2008 to August 2009. According to The Independent,
"Saramago aims to cut through the web of 'organized lies' surrounding humanity, and to convince readers by
delivering his opinions in a relentless series of unadorned, knock-down prose blows."[22] His political
engagement has led to comparisons with George Orwell: "Orwell's hostility to the British Empire runs parallel
to Saramago's latter-day crusade against empire in the shape of globalisation."[23] When speaking to The
Observer in 2006 he said "The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I
believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.
As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved, it's the citizen who changes things. I
can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement."[24]
During a visit to Ramallah in March 2002 during the second intifada, Saramago compared the Palestinian city,
which was blockaded at the time by the Israeli army, to concentration camps. Some critics claimed Saramago's
statement was antisemitic.[9][25][26][27][28][29]
During the 2006 Lebanon War, Saramago joined Tariq Ali, John Berger, Noam Chomsky, and others in
condemning what they characterized as "a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political
aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation".[30]
He was also a supporter of Iberian Federalism.

Atheism
Saramago was an outspoken atheist and a prominent critic of religion. Due to some of his novels, mainly The
Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Cain, where he uses satire and bible quotes to describe the figure of God
as being of the highest cruelty, he came several times into conflict with the Catholic Church. The Portuguese
government lambasted his 1991 novel O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo (The Gospel according to Jesus
Christ) and struck the writer's name from nominees for the European Literature Prize, saying the atheist work
offended Portuguese Catholic convictions. The book portrays a Christ who, subject to human desires, lives with
Mary Magdalene and tries to back out of the crucifixion. [31]

Death and funeral

"Thank you Jos Saramago", Lisbon, october 2010.

Saramago suffered from leukemia. He died on 18 June 2010, aged 87, having spent the last few years of his life
in Lanzarote, Spain.[32] His family said that he had breakfast and chatted with his wife and translator Pilar del
Rio on Friday morning, after which he started feeling unwell and passed away.[33] The Guardian described him
as "the finest Portuguese writer of his generation",[32] while Fernanda Eberstadt of The New York Times said he
was "known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction".[4] Saramago's translator,
Margaret Jull Costa, paid tribute to him, describing his "wonderful imagination" and calling him "the greatest
contemporary Portuguese writer".[32] Saramago had continued his writing until his death. His most recent
publication, Cain, was published in 2009, with an English translation made available in August 2010. Saramago
had suffered from pneumonia a year before his death. Having been thought to have made a full recovery, he had
been scheduled to attend the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August 2010.[32]
Portugal declared two days of mourning.[7][6] There were verbal tributes from senior international politicians:
Luiz Incio Lula da Silva (Brazil), Bernard Kouchner (France) and Jos Luis Rodrguez Zapatero (Spain), while
Cuba's Ral and Fidel Castro sent floral tributes.[6]
Saramago's funeral was held in Lisbon on 20 June 2010, in the presence of more than 20,000 people, many of
whom had travelled hundreds of kilometres, but also notably in the absence of right-wing President of Portugal
Anbal Cavaco Silva who holidayed in Azores as the ceremony took place.[34] Silva, the Prime Minister when
Saramago's name was removed from the shortlist of the European Literary Prize, said he did not attend
Saramago's funeral because he "had never had the privilege to know him".[7] Mourners, who questioned Silva's
absence in the presence of reporters,[7] held copies of the red carnation, symbolic of Portugal's democratic
revolution.[34] Saramago's cremation took place in Lisbon,[34] with his ashes being scattered in his birthplace of
Azinhaga and in Tias in Lanzarote, his home until his death.[6]

Lost novel
The Jose Saramago Foundation announced in October 2011 the publication of a so called "lost novel" published
as The Clairvoyant (claraboia in Portuguese). It was written in the 50's and remained buried in the archive of a
publisher that the manuscript was sent to. Saramago remained silent about the work up to his death. The book
has been translated to other languages though not yet to English.[35]

Bibliography
Title
Terra do Pecado
Os Poemas Possveis
Provavelmente Alegria
Deste Mundo e do Outro
A Bagagem do Viajante
As Opinies que o DL teve
O Ano de 1993
Os Apontamentos
Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia
Objecto Quase
Levantado do Cho
Viagem a Portugal
Memorial do Convento
O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis
A Jangada de Pedra
Histria do Cerco de Lisboa
O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo
Ensaio sobre a Cegueira
Todos os Nomes
O Conto da Ilha Desconhecida
A Caverna
A Maior Flor do Mundo
O Homem Duplicado
Ensaio sobre a Lucidez
Don Giovanni ou o Dissoluto
Absolvido
As Intermitncias da Morte

Year
English title
1947 Land of Sin
1966 Possible Poems
1970 Probably Joy
1971 This World and the Other
1973 The Traveller's Baggage
1974 Opinions that DL had
1975 The Year of 1993
1976 The Notes
1977 Manual of Painting and Calligraphy
1978 Quasi Object
1980 Raised from the Ground
1981 Journey to Portugal
1982 Baltasar and Blimunda
1986 The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
1986 The Stone Raft
1989 The History of the Siege of Lisbon
1991 The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
1995 Blindness
1997 All the Names
1997 The Tale of the Unknown Island
2000 The Cave
2001 Children's Picture Book
2003 The Double
2004 Seeing

As Pequenas Memrias

2006 Small Memories

A Viagem do Elefante

2008 The Elephant's Journey

Caim

2009 Cain
The clairvoyant (not yet translated to
1953
English)

Claravaia

Year

ISBN
ISBN 972-21-1145-0

1993 ISBN 1-85754-043-3

2011
2000
1987
1991
1994
1996
1993
1997
1999
1999
2002

ISBN 0-15-100587-7
ISBN 0-15-110555-3
ISBN 0-15-199735-7
ISBN 0-15-185198-0
ISBN 0-15-100238-X
ISBN 0-15-136700-0
ISBN 0-15-100251-7
ISBN 0-15-100421-8
ISBN 0-15-100595-8
ISBN 0-15-100414-5

2004 ISBN 0-15-101040-4

2006 ISBN 0-15-101238-5

2005 Don Giovanni, or, Dissolute Acquitted

2005 Death with Interruptions

2008 ISBN 1-84655-020-3

ISBN 978-0-152010
101508-5
ISBN 978-972-212010
2017-3
2011 ISBN 978-6071103161
2011

The Double
Tertuliano Mximo Afonso is a divorced high school history teacher who spends his nights reading about
Mesopotamian civilizations. One day, at a colleague's suggestion, Tertuliano rents a movie in which he sees a
man that looks exactly like him. Tertuliano becomes obsessed with meeting the man and spends weeks
discovering the actor's name. He then sends a letter to the production company, from his girlfriend's address,
posing as a film student in order to be put in contact with the actor. His relationship with his girlfriend, Maria da
Paz, suffers because he refuses to disclose to her his motives. After receiving his phone number and address,
Tertuliano stalks his twin, Antnio Claro, eventually calling him. Claro's wife thinks Tertuliano is her husband.
When finally the two men talk, they discover their voices are exactly the same and they share identical scars and
moles. Initially, Antnio Claro dismisses Tertuliano and refuses to meet, but he later contacts him and agrees.
They decide to meet at Claro's country home in a week.
Tertuliano buys a fake beard and drives out of town to meet Claro. Upon arrival, the men strip down and find
that they are indeed identical, and they discover they were born on the same month, day, and year. Before
Tertuliano leaves, Claro asks him to clarify one more thing: the exact time he was born. He wants to know
which one of them is the original, and which is the double. Tertuliano tells him that he was born at two in the
afternoon. Smugly, Claro informs Tertuliano that he was born a half hour earlier, making him the original.
Tertuliano gets up to leave, telling Claro he still has one small compensation in that Claro will be the first to die,
thereby making himself, the duplicate, into the original. To this, Claro responds, "Well, I hope you enjoy those
thirty-one minutes of personal, absolute, and exclusive identity, because that is all you will enjoy from now on."
The men agree that they have no reason to ever meet again, and Tertuliano leaves.
Tertuliano sends the fake beard to Antnio Claro, who has not been able to stop thinking about the meeting.
Meanwhile, Tertuliano and Maria get engaged to be married. Claro wonders about the circumstances under
which Tertuliano was able to obtain his phone number and address. After visiting the production company
offices, Claro comes to possess the letter, written by Tertuliano but signed by his girlfriend, Maria da Paz, and
bearing her address. Donning the fake beard, Claro stakes out Maria's apartment and, finding her very attractive,
he follows her to work. Claro realizes that Tertuliano has not told Maria da Paz about their situation.
Soon after, Claro pays Tertuliano a visit at his home. He presents Tertuliano with the letter that he obtained from
the production company, with Maria da Paz's signature. Tertuliano tells him to leave and threatens to call the
police. Claro responds that he, in turn, will call Maria da Paz and inform her of the whole situation. Tertuliano is
stunned and asks Claro what he wants. Claro tells him he intends to spend the night with Maria. In fact, Claro
has already contacted her and persuaded her to spend the night with him at his country home of which, posing
as Tertuliano, he explains he is a potential buyer. Claro views his actions as revenge for Tertuliano's disruption
into his married, stable life. Furious and ashamed, Tertuliano gives Claro his clothes, identification, and the keys
to his car in order for Claro to fully sell his appearance to Maria da Paz.
After Claro leaves, Tertuliano dresses in the clothes the other man has left behind, gets in Claro's car and drives
to his house where he proceeds to make love to Claro's wife, Helena. In the morning, she makes him breakfast
while he reads the paper; she never suspects that it is not her husband.
Meanwhile, Maria da Paz and Antnio Claro have spent the night together as well. In the morning, Maria wakes
first and notices the indentation on Claro's finger from years of wearing a wedding ring. She deduces that the
man is not Tertuliano. Hysterical, she demands to be taken home.
At first, Tertuliano hopes that Claro will return to find him in bed with his wife, but as time passes, his anxiety
concerning Maria da Paz causes him to leave and he rushes to a pay phone to call her house. A colleague of
Maria's answers the phone and informs Tertuliano that Maria da Paz died earlier that morning in a car accident.
Tertuliano, realizing that his life as he knows it is now over, checks into a hotel and calls his mother to tell her
he is alive. She meets him at the hotel and he tells her everything. The next day, he buys a newspaper to learn
the details of the accident: a head on collision with a truck. The truck driver, when questioned by police,
revealed that the passengers in the car appeared to be quarreling before their automobile crossed the center lane

and crashed into the truck. Tertuliano drives back to Antnio Claro's house and reveals himself to Helena,
telling her that the man who died was not Tertuliano, but her husband. He presents to her Antnio's
identification and asks for her forgiveness, to which she responds, "Forgive is just a word." Helena asks
Tertuliano to stay with her and take the place of her husband and he accepts.
Three days later, as Tertuliano is reading on Mesopotamian civilization, the phone rings. Tertuliano answers and
the voice on the other end exlaims, "At last!" in a voice identical to his own. The man has been trying to reach
him for months, and claims to be his double; Tertuliano agrees to meet him in a park nearby that night.
Tertuliano changes clothes, loads the pistol he keeps in the house and puts it through his belt; he writes Helena a
note, "I'll be back" and goes to meet the man.

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

(in Portuguese: O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis) is a 1984 novel by Portuguese novelist Jos Saramago, the
winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in literature. It tells the story of the final year in the life of the title character,
Ricardo Reis, one of the many heteronyms used by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa.
In the novel, Ricardo Reis returns to his native Lisbon from Brazil, upon receiving word of Pessoa's death.
While there, he chooses not to resume his practice of medicine, but rather takes up residence in a hotel where he
wastes his days reading newspapers and wandering the streets of Lisbon.
The novel was translated into English in 1993 and won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.[1]
Themes
The novel addresses several powerful literary themes, but most of them indirectly. For instance, Reis reads of
the events leading to the Spanish Civil War, and he sees floods of Spanish immigrants arrive in Lisbon seeking
refuge, but he himself never expresses strong feelings or even a cogent understanding of the meaning of the
conflict.
Reis also carries on a lackluster love affair, but even in what seem to be his most intimate relationships, he is
continually and voluntarily alienated from society. The most revealing glimpse of Reis is in a series of
conversations with the spirit of Fernando Pessoa, over the course of which Reis loses a clear concept of the
nature of life and death and the difference between the two.
In the novel's final scene, Reis "dies" by calmly putting on his jacket and following Pessoa to the graveyard.
Ultimately, it is a story of one man's attempt to resist any sort of cultural contextualization and reject any place
in society whatsoever.
This book is also, in some sense, an exercise in meta-literature. Fernando Pessoa created the character of
Ricardo Reis fifty years or more before this novel was written, giving him a biography and writing many poems
in that name. That Saramago would place the two characters side by side suggests a deliberate blurring of the
boundaries between fantasy and reality, a theme common in Saramago's work, and a rejection of traditional
limitations on narrative practices. Interestingly, Reis spends much of his time reading a novel called The God of
the Labyrinth, a fictional novel mentioned by Jorge Luis Borges and attributed to the title character of his short
story "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain".
Style
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is written in Saramago's distinctive style, in which he uses no punctuation
except commas and periods, denoting dialogue and changes of speaker using only capital letters. He uses long,
flowing sentences and paragraphs often several pages in length. Saramago also digresses from the story
frequently, occasionally even in the first person, remarking philosophically on the significance of images,
objects or situations encountered in the story. Saramagos writing technique often has strong magical-realist
elements.

All the Names

The main setting of the novel is the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths of some ambiguous and
unnamed city. This municipal archive holds the record cards for all residents of the city stretching back
endlessly into the past. The protagonist is named Senhor Jos; the only character to be given a proper name (all
of the others are referred to simply by some unique and defining characteristic). Senhor Jos is around fifty
years old and has worked as a low-level clerk in the Central Registry for more than twenty years. His residence,
where he lives alone, adjoins the building and contains the only side entrance into it. Lost in the tedium of a
bureaucratic job, he starts to collect information about various famous people and decides, one evening, to use
the side entrance to sneak in and steal their record cards. On one nocturnal venture he grabs the record card of
an "unknown woman" by mistake and quickly becomes obsessed with finding her. Senhor Jos uses his power
as a registry clerk to gather information from her past neighbors and, when it is suggested to look her up in a
phone book, he ignores the advice choosing instead to keep his distance. The search begins to consume him and
affects his work enough to draw attention from the Registrar, head of the Central Registry, who, strangely,
begins to regard Senhor Jos with sympathy. This special attention given to a clerk by the Registrar is
unprecedented in the known history of the Central Registry and begins to worry his fellow employees. Senhor
Jos further neglects his duties as a civil servant and risks his career to pursue a woman he knows basically
nothing about.
Themes
One of the main themes in All the Names, shown through Senhor Jos's journey in piecing together the life of
the unknown woman and the effects she had on other people/things, as well as the registry's conclusion that the
living and dead's files should be put together as one, is that in order to be properly looked at, the human
condition must include the lives of the living and the dead, the remembered and the forgotten, and the known
and unknown. Indeed, this is a recurring theme in Saramago's works.
Another theme is the absurdity of human action. As Saramago puts it:
"Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions, decisions make us. The proof can be found in the fact that, though
life leads us to carry out the most diverse actions one after the other, we do not prelude each one with a period
of reflection, evaluation and calculation, and only then declare ourselves able to decide if we will go out to
lunch or buy a newspaper or look for the unknown woman.[1]"

The Cave
The story concerns an elderly potter named Cipriano Algor, his daughter Marta, and his son-in-law Maral. One
day, the Center, literally the center of commerce in the story, cancels its order for Cipriano's pottery, leaving the
elderly potter's future in doubt. He and Marta decide to try their hand at making clay figurines and astonishingly
the Center places an order for hundreds. But just as quickly, the order is cancelled and Cipriano, his daughter,
and his son-in-law have no choice but to move to the Center where Maral works as a security guard. Before
long, the mysterious sound of digging can be heard beneath the Center, and what the family discovers will
change their lives forever.
The Allegory of the Cavealso known as the Analogy of the Cave, Plato's Cave, or the Parable of the Cave
is an allegory used by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work The Republic to illustrate "our nature in its
education and want of education" (514a). It is written as a dialogue narrated by Plato's friend Socrates and
Plato's brother Glaucon at the beginning of Book VII(514a520a). The Allegory of the Cave is presented after
the metaphor of the sun (507b509c) and the analogy of the divided line (509d513e). All three are chacterized
in relation to dialectic at the end of Book VII and VIII (531d534e).
Plato lets Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives,
facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind
them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato's Socrates, the shadows are as close as

the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from
the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, as he can perceive
the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.
The Allegory may be related to Plato's Theory of Forms, according to which the "Forms" (or "Ideas"), and not
the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of
reality. Only knowledge of the Forms constitutes real knowledge.[1] In addition, the Allegory of the Cave is an
attempt to explain the philosopher's place in society: to attempt to enlighten the "prisoners".
Inside the cave
In Plato's fictional dialogue, Socrates begins by describing a scenario in which what people take to be real
would in fact be an illusion. He asks Glaucon to imagine a cave inhabited by prisoners who have been chained
and held immobile since childhood: not only are their arms and legs held in place, but their heads are also fixed,
compelled to gaze at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and
the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which people walk carrying things on their heads "including figures of
men and animals made of wood, stone and other materials". The prisoners watch the shadows cast by the men,
not knowing they are shadows. There are also echoes off the wall from the noise produced from the walkway.
Socrates suggests the prisoners would take the shadows to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds, not
just reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen or heard. They would praise as clever, whoever
could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world, and the
whole of their society would depend on the shadows on the wall.
Release from the cave
Socrates then supposes that a prisoner is freed and permitted to stand up. If someone were to show him the
things that had cast the shadows, he would not recognize them for what they were and could not name them; he
would believe the shadows on the wall to be more real than what he sees.
"Suppose further," Socrates says, "that the man was compelled to look at the fire: wouldn't he be struck blind
and try to turn his gaze back toward the shadows, as toward what he can see clearly and hold to be real? What if
someone forcibly dragged such a man upward, out of the cave: wouldn't the man be angry at the one doing this
to him? And if dragged all the way out into the sunlight, wouldn't he be distressed and unable to see "even one
of the things now said to be true," viz. the shadows on the wall (516a)?
After some time on the surface, however, the freed prisoner would acclimate. He would see more and more
things around him, until he could look upon the Sun. He would understand that the Sun is the "source of the
seasons and the years, and is the steward of all things in the visible place, and is in a certain way the cause of all
those things he and his companions had been seeing" (516bc). (See also Plato's metaphor of the Sun, which
occurs near the end of The Republic, Book VI)[2]
Return to the cave
Socrates next asks Glaucon to consider the condition of this man. "Wouldn't he remember his first home, what
passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, and consider himself happy and them pitiable? And wouldn't
he disdain whatever honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the ones who guessed best which
shadows followed which? Moreover, were he to return there, wouldn't he be rather bad at their game, no longer
being accustomed to the darkness? Wouldn't it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes
corrupted, and that it's not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and
kill the man who attempts to release and lead them up, wouldn't they kill him?" (517a) The prisoners, ignorant
of the world behind them, would see the freed man with his corrupted eyes and be afraid of anything but what
they already know. Philosophers analyzing the allegory argue that the prisoners would ironically find the freed
man stupid due to the current state of his eyes and temporarily not being able to see the shadows which are the
world to the prisoners.

Remarks on the allegory

Socrates remarks that this allegory can be taken with what was said before, namely the metaphor of the Sun,
and the divided line. In particular, he likens
"the region revealed through sight"the ordinary objects we see around us"to the prison home, and the light
of the fire in it to the power of the Sun. And in applying the going up and the seeing of what's above to the
soul's journey to the intelligible place, you not mistake my expectation, since you desire to hear it. A god
doubtless knows if it happens to be true. At all events, this is the way the phenomena look to me: in the region
of the knowable the last thing to be seen, and that with considerable effort, is the idea of good; but once seen, it
must be concluded that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautifulin the visible
realm it gives birth to light and its sovereign; in the intelligible realm, itself sovereign, it provided truth and
intelligenceand that the man who is going to act prudently in private or in public must see it" (517bc).
After "returning from divine contemplations to human evils", a man
"is graceless and looks quite ridiculous whenwith his sight still dim and before he has gotten sufficiently
accustomed to the surrounding darknesshe is compelled in courtrooms or elsewhere to contend about the
shadows of justice or the representations of which they are the shadows, and to dispute about the way these
things are understood by men who have never seen justice itself?" (517de)