Plato's Cave: Powderhead or the city?

While reading the first two "Violent" chapters, I was strongly put in mind of the myth of Plato's Cave (i.e. imagine that we have all been chained in a dark cave and are unable to accurately understand shadows moving on the walls of the cave. Then, one of our fellows escapes and, after a life of darkness, is blinded by the sun--or Plato's ideal Truth. Because the sun/Truth is so powerful and dazzling, he stumbles about disoriented and, to the ignorant, chained masses in the cave, he looks and sounds like a crazy person upon his return. Brief lit theory refresher in a nutshell;))

In the context of this story, I think the question is whether Powderhead or the city is the true cave. In its isolation, Powderhead seems like a dead ringer for the cave, where Tarwater has been chained to the hem of his uncle, and his uncle's plow. However, one of the most perplexing passages thus far suggests that the old man (old Tarwater) might be the blinded, disoriented seer of Truth: "a finger of fire" comes out of the sun and touches him (332). When I first read this, I thought perhaps it was a colorful interpretation of a stroke. Either way, it seems to be disorienting, and he is frustrated that the aching, searing element of truth falls on him as "destruction...in his own brain" (332). The repeated references to the old man's insanity only reinforce the argument. He stands outside the sister's door hollering his received truth, and it put in an asylum. But Plato writes that "the eyes can become confused in two different ways, as a result of two different sets of circumstances: it can happen in the transition from light to darkness, and also in the transition from darkness to light." (Norton, 67, from The Republic, Book X).

I think this parallel is significant because the cave myth deals explicitly with epistemology, and young Tarwater's primary anxieties are epistemological as well. He "knows" what his uncle has told him, but he is suspicious of his source of knowledge. He wants to understand "how" he knows. Indeed, there are many references to the basic epistemological concerns knotted between Descartes, Locke, and their respective descendents ad nauseum. At one point, Tarwater asks the old man how he could have been sure the schoolteacher was glad to see him; the old man replies "I'm as sure...as I am that this here...is my hand and not yours" (374). (i.e. with only their senses as sources of information, how can Tarwater or the old man even know the hand exists in the first place? This is not the most signficant, thematic example, but I think it is still worth noting). The great anxiety surrounding Powderhead is Tarwater's position of having to take all his knowledge on faith from an unreliable source, against whom he can make no comparisions. Even the stranger who attends Tarwater as he digs the grave shadow's Descartes "malicious demon" who is determined to obstruct truth at every turn.

So as we follow young Tarwater's progress in the city, we might want to consider whether his confused state--any apparent ignorance or madness that mirrors the old man's--stems from a transition from darkness to light, or from light to darkness. Plato writes that when observing an apparently disoriented, confused and/or insane person, one should consider whether his "mind was returning from a mode of existence which involves greater lucidity and had been blinded by the unfamiliar darkness, or whether it was moving from relative ignorance to relative lucidity and had been overwhelmed and dazzled by the increased brightness" (Norton, 67).