By Night in Chile

The motifs of shadow and light allude to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” speaking to both The Illusion of Literary Immortality and The Past as Mutable and Uncertain. The allusion to Plato’s allegory becomes explicit during Farewell and Urrutia’s dinner, when a lightning storm projects the shadows of passersby on the restaurant wall. In the ensuing conversation, Urrutia insolently jokes that Plato has an excellent book on their topic of discussion (referring to Book VII of the Republic).

Plato’s allegory is about the falsity of sensory perception and the truth of philosophy. He imagines a group of people who have grown up shackled in a cave, forced to look at shadow play on the cave wall. The shadows are created by people behind the prisoners, but since the prisoners cannot see the people themselves, they mistake the shadows for reality. Even if a prisoner escapes into the sunlight to see things as they really are, the people in the cave will still cling to their old understanding of the world. For Plato, uneducated people are like the prisoners.