Blindness In King Lear Essay

In the analytical paper “‘I Stumble When I Saw’: Interpreting Gloucester’s Blindness in King Lear” written By Robert B. Pierce, he analyzes how disability often plays a symbolic role in literature and the stereotype surrounding blindness. Then, the author analyzed Gloucester from the literature King Lear. In the beginning of the essay, blindness is characterized as the ultimate disaster in one’s life, and it is either worse than or near to death. Blind individual is often depicting as helpless and incapable of achieving anything on his or her own without other individual’s assistance. The common stigma associated with blindness is “intellectual and spiritual imperception”. If even the literature promotes such stigmas on blindness, it makes society opening up to understanding blind individual even a more difficult task to achieve. However, it is not entirely the author's fault for conspiring against the blind, rather, it is the social norm on blind individual that is influencing their work. On the other hand, literature inevitability shoulders a serious responsibility in hindering blind individual from integrating into the society. The author then proceeds to offer several approaches us, as readers, can respond to this issue.
Even though King Lear is a tragic play, blindness also plays an important theme as we witness the horrific scene when Gloucester’s eye is pulled out, and Lear loses his sanity. It is said that blindness is disguise as a disaster, which can often end in death. The powerful duke lost his eye, which he then suffers helplessly throughout the play and beg for death. Shakespeare uses an idea call tragic compensation, which is when a blind individual has a unique insight, such as the characters from Tiresias and Oedipus. Then the author summarizes the excerpt of the play when Gloucester loses his eye, and gives a brief analysis of the