One of the harshest conflicts within all of King Lear is not between Lear’s daughters and he, but rather an inner dissonance as he loses …show more content…
Cordelia’s death is the highest extent to which King Lear’s consequences reach. There seems to be no limit to suffering for Lear although he is once able to speak in iambic pentameter again and gathered his senses, since the time is not right, except “it is a chance which does redeem all sorrows that ever [he had] felt” (5.3 320-1). The death of Cordelia would have never occurred the way that it had if King Lear had not been so reckless on map day, but he accepts that he “killed the slave that was a-hanging thee” (5.3 330) and knows there is nothing more he can do but to mourn. There is nothing more for Lear to do except “pray [Albany] undo this button” (5.3 373) and die by his heartbreak along with his most precious daughter. Although his tragic flaw of vanity created a chain of events that were both undesirable and unnecessary, such as the death of all three of his daughters, Gloucester and Edmund, King Lear was underneath a man who just needed an incident to awaken him to his