Thinking Outside the Box

                   Plato and Sartre both characterize our thinking as something that can be manipulated. In "The Allegory of the Cave", people's minds are influenced by others. In "No Exit", the characters themselves represent the shackles that hinder their individual thinking or doing.Whether by an outside or inside force, ones open mind can be limited.
                  Through the use of the prisoners, Plato helps us understand a closed mind and man's relationship with it's closed mind. Plato's shackled prisoners represent humans that are blindly forced to think a certain way about life and Plato uses the unshackled enlightened man who was once a prisoner to represent someone who has found new knowledge of life. Because these shackled, close minded, prisoners repel new information they kill the enlightened man who tried to take off their shackles. Their narrow minds forbid them to want new information. An example of a closed mind, like the one being addressed, are students who are told cooperative work is bad. Questioned in Dr.Preston's "The Role of Interdependence in Strategic Collaboration", why should cooperative success equal no success at all, just because someone enforced it?
                    Sartre's uses the characters to help us visualize how self-limitation limits our thinking. The setting of hell brings in to play the subject of ineluctable torture, which represents a unchangeable mind due to a closed mind. Because all three of these characters are similar, they serve as each others hells, each bringing out their most unwanted traits, bringing them torture. Therefore technically they bring this upon themselves with their own insecurities. So with that said, that is why when the door was open, representing a chance for a free mind, nobody tried to leave because of their narrow minds.