Thinking Outside the Box

I firstly want to say that Sartre's play, No Exit, was an excellent story that I very much enjoyed reading. Okay, back to business. Plato and Sartre both address the subject on our limitations of thinking in certain situations. Plato's took place in a dark, dank cave where it was isolated from the outside world. Sartre wrote his characters in a situation that puts them literaly in Hell. Plato viewed our limitations of thinking through the eyes of the cave prisoners, which was very restricted in a sense whereas compared to someone who has lived beyond that of the cave. Sartre viewed our limitations of thinking through the eyes of the three main characters inside that room in the Second Empire building... right smack in the middle of Hell. Garcin, who used to run the pacifist newspaper, views the situation as something he doesn't want to deal with and would rather think to himself than work it out. Estella, the one who died of pneumonia, mainly focused on her own personal accounts and reminisced on her past love life. Inez, who reveals a dark past, spoke her mind towards the situation more than the other two and was nearly pessimistic about everything, which annoyed the hell out of the other two characters. It's like that one quote: "People can look at the same sitautions and arrive at different conclusions." The extended metaphor would be Plato's cave and Sartre's own personal Hell in which there can ultimately be no escape based on the limitations of our thinking. Plato believes that our limitations are controlled by the environment in which we reside in. Sartre's characters arrive at a place they were unfamiliar with and they're take on it are completely different. How they end up solving it was reluctantly admitting that they were to stay in this infernal... inferno forever and learn to deal with each other. Plato arrives at a conclusion that only YOU can control the limits you are willing to push by thinking outside the box and exploring out there with your mind.

A/N: I love the quote in No Exit when Garcin yells: "HELL IS--OTHER PEOPLE!!" The ending also gave me chills as well as made me laugh a little by them accepting that they're just going to have to deal being with each other FOREVER. Ah, well. :)