Although Plato and Sartre had different intentions in writing each of their respective pieces ("Allegory of the Cave" for describing effective leaders and "No Exit" for describing the existentialist vision of a true "hell") they both took advantage of several literary techniques, such as allegory and symbolism, to describe the limitations of human thought.
"Allegory of the Cave" and "No Exit" were two allegories that illuminated their author's philosophy regarding the way humans think. Both Plato and Sartre used a form of symbolism to demonstrate the idea that our concept of reality restricts our ability to think/act freely. For Plato, this was manifested graphically by shackles chained around the cave-dwellers bodies, physically limiting the men's abilities to view the real world. Sartre's example was much less graphic, and much more implied. One example of symbolism in "No Exit" would be the representational value of the character Garcin.
Because the men imprisoned in "Allegory of the Cave" were shackled in a certain position, they were incapable of seeing everything that was happening behind them. (There stood the puppeteers that cast Forms in front of the light.) Instead they could only see images reflected onto one of the cave walls-- shadows. These shadows are abstractions, ideas that are separated from their tangible form. Because they were chained in for all of their lives, they were comfortable with their condition-- implying that they innately believed everything they saw reflected on the cave wall was real. However, Plato insists that the men are intellectually limited to realizing what is real because they constantly mistake the abstractions for the real thing. For instance, if one of the puppeteers held an object like a pencil up to the light, the men would see the image on the cave wall and say "I see a pencil." When taken at face value, this seems quite reasonable. But Plato points out that the speaker is wrong because he is in fact seeing the shadow of a pencil, not an actual pencil. The man doesn't realize that he is wrong because never knew differently from the shadows, therefore they had no reason to disbelieve what he saw. What is important here, and what I am getting at, is that Plato believed that our thinking was limited and/or flawed at birth. This is shown by the fact that the men (representative of society at-large) are being kept in the cave against their own will. All that they ever knew were the shadows, the abstractions; they must be disabused of their perception of reality by the enlightened philosophers.
As an existentialist, Sartre gave a very different interpretation on why human thought is limited. Existentialists focus on the fact that humans think differently about their own existence and mortality than other animals do. They tend to examine how the human mind copes with the ideas of true individuality, the possibility of empathy, and the authenticity of our motivations through internal reflection. This is primarily why Sartre's philosophies are so much different from Plato's. With "No Exit", Sartre demonstrated that man creates his own hell by thinking about his being and his existence. For example, Garcin was entirely consumed with reflecting on his life on Earth. At one point in the play, he called on his roommate, (for lack of a better term), Inez to pass judgment on whether or not he was a coward. Since Garcin felt that she had encountered many of the same moral obstacles during her lifetime that he had, he assumed that she would identify with his struggles and ultimately support him. His "torture", and what made the room so hellish for him, was the fact that his Inez refused to empathize with him. In this case, Garcin was limited to thinking about his short-comings because he refused to be candid and true with himself about his actions on Earth. Sartre implies that man (symbolized by Garcin) is completely aware of his true nature, as seen by Garcin's anxiety and guilt, but refuses to accept it, thus restricting his ability to think freely and inadvertently creating a sort of personal hell.
Both pieces venture even further into the human psyche to explain why an expansion of the human mind is nearly impossible for its characters by giving them an opportunity to escape their confines and explore another world. In "Allegory of the Cave" the prisoners are confronted by freed man who claims to have seen the Forms and knows what is real and what is abstract. Though the men are given a chance to escape the cave and the confines of their thinking, they revolt against the man and kill him. This could only be explained by an innate human fear of the unknown, demonstrated by the men's rejection of the free man's assertions. They were so comfortable with their own sense of reality that they would-- and did-- kill to preserve that norm. A similar scenario occurs in "No Exit". When the door opened upon Garcin's request, and he and Estelle where given a chance to escape their hells, they refused to walk out of the door. Even Inez, who completely resented the torture that Garcin and Estelle bestowed upon her, was afraid to be thrown out. This is because they were all so desperately afraid of the unknown that they would "rather bear those ills [they] have Than fly to otters that [they] know not of."
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