SOURCE: Adler, Thomas P. “‘The Blind Leading the Blind’: Rabe's Sticks and Bones and Shakespeare's King Lear.” Papers on Language and Literature 15, no. 2 (spring 1979): 203–06.

In the following essay, Adler compares Sticks and Bones with King Lear.

Near the end of Sticks and Bones, the middle play of David Rabe's Vietnam trilogy, the son David, returning home from the war physically blinded but with moral insight, chides his father Ozzie, “They will call it madness. We will call it seeing.”¹ He thereby links together the drama's two pervasive verbal and visual image patterns of reason in madness and sight in blindness which confirms what an alert audience could be expected to recognize: Rabe's indebtedness to Shakespeare's King Lear for certain symbols, character configurations, and thematic motifs. When David is delivered to the family's glossy living room like some grotesque practical joke, an unordered and unwelcome “parcel” (p. 127) for which...