Katie Bechtold

Beezus

bgreenst@miracosta.cc.ca.us

Jonathan Chaffer

Roz Gibson

Jordan1c@aol.com

kdupuy@umich.edu

Maira

People seem to be most interested in the brief reference in this song to Plato, so we shall cover that first. The line in question is "They're like the people chained up in the cave in the allegory of the people in the cave by the Greek guy." This reference is to Plato's Republic, which is available online at many sites including The Internet Classics Archive. A brief explanation of the Allegory of the Cave follows.

Plato and Socrates had a theory of what they described as "the Forms." These are the ideal concepts after which earthly things are patterned. The Allegory of the Cave was a way in which Plato (in narrating Socrates' thoughts) described the mental journey of a philosopher coming to appreciate the forms.

The allegory goes like this: Imagine a few men who have been chained in a cave all their lives. They are facing away from the mouth of the cave, and see the same wall all their lives. There is a fire behind them, and some people routinely hold up figures in front of the fire that cast shadows on the wall that look like real objects. Eventually one of the prisoners is set free and goes through a journey of discovery as he sees the fire and the figures that cast the shadows, and then eventually gets outside and sees the real objects that they represented. This journey was supposed to be similar to the feelings a philosopher experiences as he moves from physical objects to understanding of the forms. The full allegory is more complicated, but the important part in this song is that the people chained up in the cave are blind to the world outside.

So, on to the song. The most obvious reading is that the singer is in jail. His plan may be a method of escape or the truth about his crime. The song seems to imply that the singer was falsely accused. The people who testified did so because they "saw a shadow on the windowshade." Perhaps this indicates circumstantial evidence. Then comes the cave reference, which may mean that those people didn't really know what was going on. The shadow misled them.

Another idea is that the narrator is one card short of a full deck. Perhaps he is in an asylum, which explains the prison imagery. Then the "secret smile" and "plan" are the man's incorrect view the world. Talking to the mirror may be a reference to talking to one's self.

Finally, another idea is that the speaker is God, stating that nobody really understands reality. This fits in well with the Plato reference to the Forms.