King Lear

I haven't been posting about King Lear, the tragedy we're reading in Shakespeare class these days, because first of all there isn't a lot of time for me to sit, contemplate, and ponder on it. Second of all, we are working on our final projects so when I sit down to post I go to our group's blog and post. There's a lot of work to do on that so I've been caught up in it.

Well, my first impressions of King Lear weren't all that developed which is why I'm posting now and not a week ago. I've realized that this play does not have so much in the action of it. The meaning and principle in this particular play comes in the words and the individual progression of the characters. I mean, the things that go on are important but I just can't see a production of King Lear being very active. The people would be standing on the stage, secluded nearly, and use their movements to convey something but it is nothing like The Tempest where people are up, down, and all around, constantly doing something.
That is why it was hard for me to like King Lear at first. This is a very introverted thinking play, therefore it compels one who is reading or watching it to look inside themselves and find their own tragic flaw or find who they are. What a deep play to read. I guess that now I'm a little regretful that we can't spend as much class time on it.
Questions that results from this: Do we all have a tragic flaw? If so, how do we fix that?
See what this play is doing to me! It's making me think so deeply!

Sudden text to text connection!
Have you read Man's Search For Meaning? Well, it happens to be a pretty good book, and a lot like King Lear in the way that it is a story, or a lot of text, with the sole purpose of teaching you a lesson and helping you to look inward to recognize something about yourself. In this book, Victor Frankl explains his experiences in a concentration camp to provoke the thought and idea of everyone being able to choose for themselves. After everything of ours is taken away the only thing we have left is our ability to choose. But that can make a world of difference, say, in your eternal salvation. You can choose to be happy, have faith, and repent and therefore when you die you'll go to heaven. If you choose the opposite, you will end up in the opposite. This also links back to the identity theme in King Lear. We talked a lot about it in class and the question was: What are we after all we have is taken away? And also: What things in this world make us what we are or are we more of ourselves after what we have is gone? Well, putting the two texts together, I think you can better find yourself after you've been stripped of all things and in that way you can look inward and discover those flaws that you have and you can also have the time to ponder on them and how to better yourself by overcoming yourself.