Doubt Leading to Knowledge in Essay

Total Length: 763 words ( 3 double-spaced pages)

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Here is where Truman gains true knowledge, at the edges of his existence.

Philosophically speaking, Truman was unable to understand the world around him until he began to deconstruct it, one moment, and an interaction at a time. This is perhaps one of the ultimate American paranoiac fantasies and one that surfaces time and time again in modern film and stories (Zizek, 2002). This is perhaps due to the fact that many people feel their own life is a pseudo-reality were people and events are not always as thy seem. As people become more and more personally detached from one another through technology, this fantasy may indeed follow Americans within their psyche and everyday thoughts. Interestingly enough, the questioning of one's reality is the only remedy for such feelings of fantasy, and in the film, Truman's own questioning finally led him to the truth. This path was painful for him, as every step of the way his friends were unwilling to help him uncover the truth, lest the show be ruined.

Truman is a character who begins to unravel his own world through questioning the doubting of his surroundings.
Every human being goes through a similar exploratory phase, and while these phases are often initially painful, it is only through exploration and questioning that people can have any real knowledge. As Plato's Allegory of the Cave attests, "that the man was compelled to look at the fire: wouldn't he be struck blind and try to turn his gaze back toward the shadows, as toward what he can see clearly and hold to be real? What if someone forcibly dragged such a man upward, out of the cave: wouldn't the man be angry at the one doing this to him? And if dragged all the way out into the sunlight, wouldn't he be distressed and unable to see "even one of the things now said to be true," viz. The shadows on the wall." (Plato, 516 AD). Reality is only as real as people are willing to question it to gain knowledge and truth about what it truly is for each and every person.

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