Theme Of Suffering In King Lear And Second Generation

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Recommended: Evaluate the character of King Lear

Both Shakespeare and Neil Biswas in King Lear and Second Generation, explore the idea of physical and psychological suffering. In King Lear and Second Generation, almost every character seems to fall victim to some nature of suffering: Sharma and Lear 's madness when daughter 's abandon them, Edmund reminded of being illegitimate, Edgar 's true identity has to be hidden, Sam 's clash of culture with his true love, Kent 's obedience towards his master, Khan committing suicide and Gloucester 's blindness. Therefore, both Shakespeare and Biswas exploit and outline this to the audience as to how suffering is a result of physical, psychological pain which can lead to realisation.
The theme of suffering starts at the very beginning of King Lear when
The use of the syntactical parallelism here seems to indicate Cordelia 's character to the audience on how harsh and blunt she appears to her own, old father causing him to suffer. The reworks in Lear 's syntax 'So young and so untender? ', 'So young, my lord and true ' sheds a brighter light in to Cordelia 's straight forward behaviour causing her father to suffer psychological suffering. This interpretation also suggests the naivety and insecurity in Lear 's voice in due course of him being old and that is why he needs to be reassured of his own importance. The predominant use of plosives such as 'propinquity and property of blood ' conveys Lear 's frustration from the suffering that his daughters have given him but also the disappointment and sadness, mirrors the confused state his mind is in. The declarative, portraying negative energy 'Come not between the dragon and his wrath ' generates dramatic Celtic imagery, when in Britain the early Celtic tribes used the figure of a dragon on the standards they took into war, this symbolises how the suffering has made Lear feel inside. Similarly in 'Second Generation ',
The use of the dynamic verb 'strike ' conveys an image of Edgar 's mental strength building up in order to survive the sufferings of a beggar. The use of the adjectives 'numbed and mortified ' suggests the physical sufferings he is having to experience as the senses are mainly focussed upon. The use of the asyndetic listing to list the objects that are used, further hyperbolises the macabre scenes of the Bedlam Beggars previously depicted. On the whole, Edgar 's speech is made up of declarative sentences in order to create an idea of the continuous process of the mental/physical suffering that Edgar obtains. This displays an aspect of the insanity portrayed by the content of his dialogue 'My face I 'll grime with filth ' (2.2.180), which uses elision to portray the idea that this suffering is making him lose control of mental faculty, the same way the Jacobean audiences would have seen these beggars as lunatics and assume they were possessed by evil spirits and unable to feel pain, hence the the-self mutilation as part of Edgar 's disguise. On the other hand, in Second Generation it is Sharma 's flashbacks of his wife that is causing him to suffer psychologically 'Sonali, forgive me, forgive

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