Teddy is merely a modern adaptation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In that story, a cave prisoner broke free and ran away. What he found was something he'd never dreamed of in his prior life. Everything was something he didn't know, and wouldn't have known existed if he had stayed in the cave. Teddy looked out the window of his enclosure, too. He saw orange peels. Nothing astounding, but it surely would have been if he had not known that orange peels or even a world outside the boat existed. If Teddy hadn't looked, the peels weren't even really there to him.
Now, if one had lived a specific way his whole life, and one day suddenly found something new, he'd be amazed. This was true with the escaped prisoner of the allegory. He was excited and went back to tell the others, but it was not an easy feat. They were simply ignorant. Living their entire lives in the cave, there was no reason to believe anything else existed. Even if they tried to believe, they couldn't possibly do so. How can you explain 3-D to someone who lives in a 2-D world? You cannot. Teddy tried though, and people were dumbfounded. Some people hated him for it, like his father and sister. They thought he was full of nonsense and grew quickly tired of it. Others tried to understand and were intrigued, but still had more doubts than belief.
In Plato’s allegory, the people of the cave did not just make up stories on their own. For in every generation,one cannot think a thought without prior knowledge of anything. The allegory tells of a civilization, forced all their lives to stare at a wall which only showed their shadows cast in front of them. What they saw wasn't real, but only an illusion and all they'd ever known. They lived through shadows and that was their reality. We live based on what we know. We know a cat is a cat because that's what it's called; we made up a story for it. The construction of knowledge actually illustrates the way we perceive the world around us, and the fatal flaw here is that we can easily mistake this created vision for truth.
More specifically, people adhere to conventions based on what they all see and agree they have seen. Anyone who sees things differently might just be labelled an oddity. If he speaks of something they don't know, of course they won't believe him. Their fire of knowledge already shines too brightly to see clearly. In Teddy's case, the ones most skeptical of him, it seems, are the people who smoke cigarettes. His father is dead-set against his ideas, done with his nonsense and yelling at the boy for his every move. Nicholson, a fellow passenger on the cruise, has the most questions. Yet he also goes through several cigarettes during the conversation, and frequently he draws further back into disbelief. Both continue drawing themselves toward fire and away from truth.
Ultimately, both the escaped prisoner and Teddy's findings get them killed. No one wants to believe there's something huge out there that they don't know about. Teddy takes place on a cruise ship, a giant man-made thing that drifts upon the wild, vast, unknown ocean. Teddy is the only one in the story who ever looks outside the boat. The rest are content swimming with others in their safe, artificial pool upon a floating containment. Though,the ocean world looks much different from atop the deck of the ship. If they never leave the boat, they will never truly know the ocean.
