Grendel and Pluto's Allegory of the Cave

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave talks about how there humans are chained by their necks and shackled around their limbs so that they are trapped deep inside the cave of a physical world. These people have been fettered since they were born so their entire reality is simply whatever they can see in front of them since the chains around their necks prevent them from moving their heads. When they see straight the only thing they see in front of them are the shadows that are casted against the background of a fire that roars behind them. These shadows become their reality. However, one day a prisoner is unshackled and suddenly he is taken from outside the cave: all at once he is enlightened due to his exposure. Yet he is blinded at first since he is unable to look at the sun. First he looks at the shadows, then the reflection, and finally the sun itself, but when he is led back to the cave he is blinded once again because he is unable to see anything since his eyes have adjusted to the reality outside of the cave. He is mocked by his fellow peers when he is unable to see the shadows in front of him even though he knows that those aren’t really shadows and when he tries to explain he is ridiculed. Grendel’s journey in chapter two resembles the Allegory of the Cave since he leaves the “cave of ignorance” and enters the “world of sunlight.” This can be illustrated as Grendel “discovered the sunken door… came up, for the first time, to moonlight.” As he leaves his mother and the underground cave, he adventures up from the pool of “fire-snakes” and is exposed to the moonlight though later on, however, he “came out again, inevitably” and faced the sunlight. From there he begins to experiment with his new world and gain a profound sense of knowledge when he realizes the new parallels of reality that differed from those that he knows in his mother’s cave. Grendel views life in his mother’s cave as “the indifferent, burning eyes of the strangers…” yet when he is in the human world his encounters with the bull, the tree, and men he discovers how his mother is unable to hear in addition to how the bull “fought by instinct…blind mechanism ages old.” This illustrates how Grendel has arrived at his disgust for the unthinking or those who are inexpressible. Yet he also realizes how those who are thinking are dangerous—“suddenly I knew I was dealing with no dull mechanical bull but with thinking creatures, pattern makers, the most dangerous things I’d ever met…” When, however, he returns to his mother’s den is life is completely altered just like the prisoner from the Allegory of the Cave, suddenly there is no turning back. In addition to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave the zodiac symbol for chapter two of Grendel is Taurus the bull who illustrates the philosophy of Solipsism that explains how the only thing that anyone can be certain of is one’s self and self-perceptions. This reflects exactly what Grendel experiences after he has been enlightened by the outside world past his mother’s cave—“The world is all pointless accident…I exist, nothing else.”