Blinded by the Truth An essay On king lear
... a fantasy world where everything was sugarcoated for him and he never experienced raw emotion; therefore when Goneril and Regan defy him he is forced to see the truth and when he realizes his mistake he goes mad, then for the first time he becomes honest with himself. In the first part of the play Lear has blinders on to the world and he only sees and hears what he wants, nothing else. He doesn’t ask his daughter’s, "which of you doth love us most," But instead he asks, "which of you shall we say doth love us most?" (I.i.49), this demonstrates Lear’s vanity. He is not interested in honest love from the hart or peoples true feelings, he only needs to be told that he is loved and it doesn’t matter if it’s true. By banishing his honest daughter, Cordelia, Lear shows that he is completely blind to the truth. He does not see through the very thin layer of integrity that the two other daughters have, as every body else does. When Goneril and Regan first begin to rule their new land they plot many different schemes, unbeknownst to Lear, they decide to completely get rid of him and his views. Lear had created a great army; the girls decide to do away half the army, after Lear pleads to bring back the whole army, they abolish the entire army instead. This is not the first or last time Lear would plead with Goneril or Regan to change something, every time he did, he just added fuel to their fire. When Lear needed someone to stay with during a huge storm he of course would go to the daughters he thought loved him, and instead of letting him stay they made him go out into the storm to wonder the streets, alone. This is the turning point for Lear. He finally realized the mistake he made of exiling of Cordelia, and he comes to terms with that reality. He intern exiles himself from reality, he cannot deal with the fact that he has lost his true daughter. Now completely mad Lear runs into the blind Gloucester and his son Edgar, Gloucester is a noble man who is an adulterer and has one bastar...