 Sedley (2009) argues that the eschatological myth of the Gorgias is best taken as an allegory of “moral malaise and reform in our present life” (68) and Halliwell (2007) that the myth of Er may be read as an allegory of life in this world. Gonzales (2012) claims that the myth of Er offers a “spectacle [that] is, in the words of the myth itself, pitiful, comic and bewildering” (259). Thus, he argues, “what generally characterizes human life according to the myth is a fundamental opacity” (272); which means that the myth is not actually a dramatization of the philosophical reasoning that unfolds in the Republic, as one might have expected, but of everything that “such reasoning cannot penetrate and master, everything that stubbornly remains dark and irrational: embodiment, chance, character, carelessness, and forgetfulness, as well as the inherent complexity and diversity of the factors that define a life and that must be balanced in order to achieve a good life” (272). The myth blurs the boundary between this world and the other. To believe that soul is immortal and that we should practice justice in all circumstances, Gonzales argues, we have to be persuaded by what Socrates says, not by the myth of Er. Unlike the eschatological myths of the Gorgias and Phaedo, the final myth of the Republic illustrates rather “everything in this world that opposes the realization of the philosophical ideal. If the other myths offer the philosopher a form of escapism, the myth of Er is his nightmare” (277, n. 36).