Plato explains: "Will he not imagine that the shadows which he once saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him? (1129).” Since prisoners are unable to see the outside world, they are forced to strictly believe what they see. Plato describes that prisoners can only be sure of objects currently seen and not of what they have seen before. The prisoners used what they had done, just as Plato used to his advantage what he learned from the speeches of the slave owners. “The moral I took from the dialogue was the power of truth over the conscience of even a slave owner (430).” The self-centered thoughts of thinking about how he can become free took over his every thought and consumed him with listening to the conversations. Additionally, Wallace describes self-centered thoughts in which vehicles are always in his way, but he could never get in their way. For example, "In this traffic, all these vehicles are stopping and idling in my path... Or that the Hummer that just cut me off might be... he's trying to take this kid to the hospital, and he is in a bigger one, in a more legitimate hurry than me: it is in reality me who is bothering him (7). Unlike Douglass, Wallace recognized that he was only thinking about himself and not his surroundings. All of these characters demonstrate that at one point they were self-centered.