Kosinski’s Allegory of the Television

In his novel Being There, Jerzy Kosinski shows how present day culture has strayed away from the ideal society that Plato describes in his allegory of the cave. In his metaphor, Plato describes the different stages of life and education through the use of a cave. In the first level of the cave, Plato describes prisoners who are shackled and facing a blank wall. Behind them is a wall of fire with a partition that various objects are placed and manipulated by another group of people. These shadows are the only action that they ever see. They can only talk to the surrounding prisoners, and watch the puppet show on the wall in front of them. Naturally, the prisoners come to believe that the shadows on the wall in front of them are reality. The second level of the cave is where a prisoner is released of the chains and is forced to look at the light of the fire behind him. The light hurts his eyes, and after a moment of pain and confusion he sees the statues on the partial wall in front of him. These were what caused the shadows that he took to be reality. This enlightenment is the start of education for the prisoner. He then is taken from the cave into the light of the sun. At first the prisoner can see only shadows, then reflections, then real people and things. He understands that the statues were only copies of the things he now sees outside of the cave. Once he is adjusted to the light, he will look up to heavens to gain a true understanding of what reality is. This is what Plato refers to this understanding as the Form of Goodness. In Being There, Chance is in the deepest part of the cave, yet the world around him is too ignorant to realize this (Johnson 51-54)

The main character of Kosinski’s novel is Chance, a simple man that Plato would consider to be imprisoned in the first level of the cave. He has been shut off from society from his early childhood, and except for a few encounters with the maid, or other employees of “the Old Man”, he really has never talked to anyone his whole life. He knows gardening, and knows it very well. He has his own room in the Old Man’s house, and is not permitted to leave, or have any visitors. The only connection to the outside world is his TV that he watches constantly. He cannot read or write, and knows little about the world he lives in. Much like the prisoners in the cave, he is a prisoner in the house, only gaining knowledge from the shadows that moved within his TV.

His lack of social skills becomes much more apparent once he leaves the house for the first time. He has no intended destination, and wanders the streets. Once he is hurt by the limousine, he is given an injection to ease his pain. As the doctor fills the needle, he wants to show fear, not because he has had this experience before, but because “he visualized all the TV incidents in which he had seen injections being given” (Kosinski 33). Just like the prisoners in the cave, he was trying to understand a reality based on pictures in order to react to the world around him. One thing that he has never experienced is any type of a sex life. He found himself in a room with EE, where she made a sexual advance towards him. He thought back to a situation on TV where he could imitate an actor in a similar scene. He remembers a close embrace and kissing, but unfortunately for Chance, “what happened next was always obscured, and yet, Chance knew, that there could be other gestures, and other kinds of closeness following such intimacies” (Kosinski 76). Here again, Chance attempts to gain a sense of reality through the glass of a TV screen.

The satirical effect of Kosinski’s work is due to the lack of intelligence of society. The more they get to know Chance, the more they revere him as a god, or a philosopher-king as Plato would put it. Mr. Rand meets Chance, and interprets him to being a highly intelligent business man. All that Chance tells him is that he left his home and misses the “garden in which (he) can work and watch the things (he’s) planted grow” (Kosinski 39). Mr. Rand interprets this as a perfect metaphor for a good businessman, and in turn, believes Chance is a businessman himself. Throughout the entire novel, Chance’s words are interpreted as being something much deeper then they actually are. The President of the United States, along with foreign dignitaries are quoting the very simple and basic explanations of a garden that the concerned public had transformed into the enlightened ideals of a brilliant economist.

Plato believed that a philosopher-king would be required to return to the cave to help his former inmates become enlightened as he had. Kosinski shows how a man who appears to have been deep within the cave his whole life can appear to be a philosopher-king to the society that has developed in the United States today. An education that Plato was attempting to create throughout the world