Analysing the Portrayal of Eddie Carbone as a Tragic Hero Essay

Another way in which Miller creates sense of tragedy to come by creating tension in the Carbone family. There is a tension in the relationship between Eddie and Catherine; they both have an uncle and a niece relation. But the way in which they treat each other makes the audience think that they have closer relationship than a father and a daughter. The tension builds up from the beginning of the play when Eddie comments on the ‘skirt’ being ‘too short’. In this speech the audience would think that they are boyfriend and girlfriend or husband and wife until later we see that they are related to each other in a different way. Also, Eddie orders that Catherine can’t have the ‘job’ because it isn’t right for her, which is what a husband would order to their wife because the wife might have an affair with someone else. . In this we see that he is being over-protective on Catherine. Also, we see that Eddie still wants Catherine to be small because sometimes she is called ‘baby’, ‘Katie’ and ‘kid’, which is what a father and mother would call their

The end of Act 1 closely resembles a Greek Tragedy. In the boxing scene, Eddie begins to make bold moves and does things that are out of the ordinary. “Feints with his left hand and lands with his right”. He starts making mistakes without realizing it as he decides to physically hurt Rodolpho by punching him. This is just the beginning of his path towards self- destruction as he makes his fatal flaw later on in the play. The other characters in the play are all slowly turning against him. Catherine decides to be rebellious in front of Eddie, “You wanna dance, Rodolpho?” Marco challenges Eddie by asking him, “Can you lift this chair?” Beatrice criticizes Eddie for being too overprotective and his unnatural affection towards Catherine, “Well then, be an uncle then.” Rodolpho tries to reason with Eddie, “I have respect for her, Eddie.” “All right, sure. But I can’t stay in the house all the time, Eddie.”

He takes on a dual role of the lawyer and commentator. He alerts Eddie that he ‘won’t have a friend in the world’ if he keeps pushing the boundaries, he already knows Eddie’s tragedy is inevitable and builds a sense of foreshadowing. Miller has three purposes in this scene for Alfieri: to reveal the acceptance of Eddie’s feelings towards Catherine, to convey how it might affect Beatrice and to be the voice of reasoning. He bluntly tells Eddie that there is no positive way out. When Eddie implies he may have feelings for Catherine Alfieri is already aware and implies that this will be his fatal flaw. ‘he never realises it, but though the years-there is too much love for the daughter, there is too much love for the niece’. This explicitly tells Eddie to let the feelings go, Alfieri is conscious about the fact Eddie does have strong feelings towards Catherine and he is also a perceptive character which Eddie is not, but Alfieri is alert that this will be Eddie’s downfall. During Eddie’s confession time he confides his fear that Rodolpho is homosexual and is pretending to love Catherine as an opportunity to obtain a green card. Eddie says ‘He’s stealing from me!’ and ‘it’s breakin’ my heart’. This really allows the audience to feel the intensity of the frustration Eddie feels. The scenes have now created a cathartic effect because the tension has been released now that Eddie’s feelings are in the open from the audience’s

Marco’s action suggests he’s protective of his “little brother” and is quite threatening from the aspect that he rises to defend him if necessary. This is significant to the audience because it foreshadows that Eddie’s impulsive behavior will be the reason he loses Marco’s respect as well as It will be the reason “he won’t have a friend in the world.”

Conflict is a very broad topic so I will specifically be talking about conflict between Beatrice and Eddie. Their conflict is emotional, sexual, verbal and overall about their marriage. Their conflict contributes to and is relevant to the play because it puts emphasis on Eddie’s hamartia of his pride and his desire for Catherine and not Beatrice. Miller’s parents were both immigrants, which gave inspiration for the play. In the late 1940s Miller heard a story from a young lawyer about a longshoreman who had recently snitched to the immigration bureau on his own relatives (two brothers) who were immigrants, so he could end a marriage between one of the brothers and his niece; it seems America was filled with illegal immigrants at this time. The young lawyer fills the part of ‘Alfieri’ who plays the role of the Greek Chorus in the tragedy.

How does the character of Eddie develop over the play? A View From The Bridge is a play written by the American playwright Arthur Miller, a prominent figure in American Theatre. Eddie Carbone, the tragic protagonist of this modern Greek tragedy is a “Husky, slightly overweighed longshoreman”. He is constantly self-interested, wanting to promote and protect his innocence. Eddie creates a fictional fantasy world where his irrational decisions make sense—where calling the Immigration Bureau in the middle of an Italian community that prides itself on protecting illegal immigrants has no consequences. In Eddie's world, he imagines protecting Catherine from marriage or any male relationship

Miller’s A View from the Bridge, originally written in 1956 as a one act play, has many features of a classic Greek tragedy. It is set in the Italian-American neighbourhood, situated in Red Hook, near Brooklyn Bridge in New York. It is in this community Miller chooses to dramatise themes of conflict, betrayal, love and obsession. The underlying omerta is present throughout the play and is the reason for the conflict as it is defied by Eddie Carbone, the Italian longshoreman, who destroys himself in a clash between his blind passions and primeval ideas of his own people about right living.

Arthur Miller’s drama A View From the Bridge has been adapted into multiple stage versions, each maintaining the original dialogue and theme, but changing several important aspects making each production unique. First performed in 1955, Miller provides specific stage directions throughout the production to guide each scene so that they connect with the plot. Many modern versions of this play change various pieces such as props, costuming, staging, and direction; however, continue with the original characters, dialogue, and story. Miller’s words and plot shape the play into a dramatic tragedy while the modernistic direction emphasizes the realistic and emotional reasoning behind each sentence. The differences occurring in costuming, portrayal, and setting, occurring between the original written version and the stage adaptation of Miller’s classic play A View From the Bridge, change the perspective and interpretation of how the audience views the drama.

“He’s only after his papers” is what Eddie says too Catherine in Act 2 in the hopes of persuading her to stop feeling affection towards Rodolpho, this only angers B as she acts as the buffer between Eddie and Catherine in these miniscule skirmishes between them. And later on Eddie finally takes it a step too far and calls the immigration office to report Marco and Rodolpho. As the immigration arrives Eddie tries to ward of the officers by saying things like: “Where’s who?” and “We got nobody here.” This might be because he genuinely changed his mind or he just doesn’t want B to know that he reported Marco and Rodolpho. This all contributes to Marco’s hate and distrust towards Eddie. Marco then publically humiliates Eddie by spitting at his feet and says “you robbed my children!” Eddie keeps persisting that it wasn’t him who had reported them, although he knows that it is obvious that he did so. Later Eddie is informed that Marco is praying in church, which strongly implies that Marco is preparing to take justice into his own hands (murdering Eddie). It goes on until finally Marco provokes Eddie to where Eddie pulls a knife and Marco turning the blade around and killing Eddie with his own knife.

But the women did not think so, the boy went away poor, hungry and very bruised. That women beat him with a very long wooden board. Trust me when I say, that it hurts a lot. I got whipped with it one time, when I was nine years old. When I stole a 600 dollar watch from an old black man, he grabbed me and turned me around and let me have it. You would not know it from his appearance, but he was very strong, he made me sore for 4 days after that whipping. and from experience, I can say for certain. He is going to feel that in the morning, if not the next week.

His feelings for Catherine are subtextual for most of the play, but are voiced by Alfieri during their first conversation and Beatrice in the final scene. Alfieri asks “[Catherine] can’t marry you, can she?” which causes Eddie to “(furiously)” as per stage directions refute this claim. Alfieri’s rhetorical question and ironic humour stoke Eddie’s rage, which appears again when Beatrice accuses him of being attracted to Catherine, portraying him as stubborn since his infuriated reaction to Alfieri’s comment makes it clear to audiences that he’s deluding himself. However, Alfieri strikes a chord and from this audiences are made aware of Eddie’s motivation for demeaning Rodolpho – namely jealousy – which leads to Eddie reporting him and Marco to immigration, resulting in a fight that causes Eddie’s death. He reacts similarly when Beatrice laments “(crying out, weeping) You want somethin’ else, Eddie, and you can never have her!”, the accusatory direct address of the repeated pronoun “you” voicing her anguish over Eddie’s attraction to Catherine but still not putting it in explicit terms. These situations exemplify the allusion typical of Miller when approaching social taboos in the play, which has a contrasting effect on audiences: they are exposed to the taboo, but Miller

Eddie is the protagonist and a classic tragic hero. It was common for the tragic hero to be someone ordinary and not of high birth. Eddie is a longshoreman his character is generally decent, loving and responsible. Throughout the play he is protective towards Catherine ‘I'm responsible for you', ‘she's gonna finish school'. During the play we see Eddies character obsessing with Catherine. He soon becomes sexually attracted to her, and is unable

Alfieri An Italian-American lawyer is the narrator of the story. He speaks straight to the audience and attempts to make clear the greater social and moral inferences of the story. The play is told from the viewpoint of Alfieri, the view from the bridge between American and Italian cultures who attempts to factually give a picture of Eddie Carbone and the 1950s Red Hook, Brooklyn community. Alfieri represents the difficulties personified in the Brooklyn Bridge from the small ethnic communities filled with dock workhands to the disparate cosmopolitan wealth and intellectualism of Manhattan.

To conclude, Alfieri creates tension and conflict in the act by making the community of the play turn against Eddie. Eddie brought his downfall towards himself which is part of the Greek Tragedy. Eddie is betrayed by the community in which he lives in. Towards the ending of the play, violence erupts and Marco, with rage, stabs Eddie. Marco’s representation of the Italian law is opposite of than what Alfieri viewed, they both represent an honor. The actions taken by Eddie agitates both his family and the community of the

The thematic elements found throughout many of William Shakespeare’s plays are numerous. Such themes further develop the plot of the story and help explain a universal purpose the story has. Imagination seeps through every crevice in the reader’s mind as to what a theme can be alluding to. Throughout many of Shakespeare’s written works, it can be noted that death, in particular suicide, is a relevant and ongoing theme that Shakespeare gives way to. A prime example is that of the well-known tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare does not stop at the tragedy of the star crossed lovers, but further goes on to write several more tragedies that deal with suicide such as: Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Othello, and Hamlet. The