Prisoners in the Cave or Teenagers with iPhones: A Comparative Analysis of Human Society Imagine what it would be like to see the world differently then all of your peers and colleagues, like you had some superpower or sixth sense that told you: this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. We all curse the geniuses that come up with brilliant life-changing inventions and ideas; where does this magnificent insight come from? Why couldn’t we think of it ourselves? Maybe these intellects are destined for greatness. Maybe they possess a unique quality that calls for such knowledge. Regardless, each enlightened one contributes a specific notion that perceivably changes the world. Benjamin Franklin gave us electricity, Steve Jobs gave us the iPhone, and Plato gave us the ability to recognize the importance of understanding the world through spiritual. Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave”, published around 390 BCE, is a metaphorical description of human society, written for the average citizen during that time period. Plato describes to the people the process of becoming enlightened after living in a world of deceit by using an allegory of ‘prisoners’ that live in a ‘cave’ who go outside to see the light, including detailed parallels and hidden meanings. I will validate Plato’s idea of a perfect society by comparing his ideas to the ideas depicted in Ursula Le Guin’s “The One’s Who Walk Away from Omelas” from 1973 and Andy and Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix from 1999. By comparing and contrasting the diverse concepts in each work, I can assess the rationality of Plato’s claims and deem them effective or not in defining the process of enlightenment. “The Allegory of the Cave” was a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon in The Republic, which consisted of books discussing political and ethical justice in human societyIn the short story, Suffer the little Children, Stephen King tells the tale of an old school teacher who faces an unusual problem. The teacher, Miss Sidley, is forced to deal with a group of children unlike any she had faced in her life; these children were different, very different. The children in the story are not human. The discovery of this causes Miss Sidley to act in ways she never thought capable, eventually leading to murder. King conveys the theme: what you don’t know and don’t understand can be very harmful, in a suspenseful manor by using the literary tools tone, setting and characterization. King utilizes tone in a suspenseful manner to convey the theme. Tone is used to help the reader understand the attitude of the story. Tone is first shown on page 440, “...she could turn her back on her pupils with confidence.” This sentence demonstrates to the reader Miss Sidley’s superiority over the children. Tone is again used shortly after to show a shift in power. “Miss Sidley was suddenly, unaccountably sure Robert knew about her little trick with the glasses” (440). Later in the story, on page 444, tone is used to put fear in the readers minds, “His face suddenly ran together like melting wax, the eyes flattening and spreading like knife-struck egg yolks, nose widening and yawning, mouth disappearing. The head elongated, and the hair was not hair but straggling, twitching growths.” King then uses tone to show Miss Sidley’s transformation into a killer, “She went back up to the room and began to lead them down, one by one. She killed twelve of them and would have killed them all if Mrs. Crossen hadn’t come down for a package of composition paper” (446). King uses suspense to keep the reader interested and involved in the story. Suspense is first seen on pages 440-441. After Miss Sidley asked Robert to put the word tomorrow into a sentence and listened to his response she turned back to..Stephen King is one of the most successful authors of the twentieth-century. He brings nightmares to life in a way that no other writer has succeeded to do, and is now among the most prestigious horror writers of the time. King is indeed a genius at work; however, to fully understand the legacy of Stephen King, one must understand the background from which he came and the manner in which he handled it. Due to the desertion of his father and his lack of self-esteem, Stephen decided early in his childhood that he would not be consumed by the terrors of his fears. He created a world of fantasy in which he controlled the terror. By definition, a fantasy is "the power or process of creating unrealistic or improbable images in response to a psychological need" (Webster Dictionary). Stephen King has proven to be a master of this process, as he continues to baffle the minds of horror reader's around the world. Unlike past authors of horror and science fiction, King writes about topics that his audience may easily identify with and relate to their everyday lives, instead of focusing on literature that completely exempts the reader from relating the book to their fears. Novels such as Pet Cemetery, Cujo, and Christine were successful exa