Discuss the ways in which Arthur Miller uses the character of Alfieri to highlight cultural differences and to develop the audience's understanding of theme, character and plot.

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Alfieri’s role as the symbolic bridge between the two cultures and his commentary on life for Italian immigrants is very important in ‘A View From The Bridge’

Discuss the ways in which Arthur Miller uses the character of Alfieri to highlight cultural differences and to develop the audience’s understanding of theme, character and plot.

        Alfieri is a key character in the play ‘A View From the Bridge’ by Arthur Miller.  He acts as both the chorus and as a character that interacts with other characters.  When he is acting as the chorus he gives the audience a deeper understanding of the plot, whereas when he is acting as another character he expresses what the other characters are not able to express freely themselves.  This helps the audience immensely, due to the other characters being inarticulate and sometimes cryptic with what they feel.  As well as helping the audience’s understanding of the play he also highlights cultural differences between America and Italy.  This is essentially because he was educated in both cultures.

        

Alfieri's opening speech takes place with him acting as the chorus.  In the beginning of Alfieri's speech he gives us a taste of Sicilian life.  He tells us that ‘in Sicily, from where their fathers came, the law has not been a friendly idea since the Greeks came’.  This tells us two things.  The first is that in this area there are a lot of people that originate from Sicily.  The second is about Sicilian culture; he also says he thinks that ‘behind that suspicious little nod of theirs lie three thousand years of distrust’.  The audience can tell from this that in Sicilian culture there is a lot of revenge in their life and that grudges last for a very long time.

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        The audience also hears that he ‘no longer keeps a pistol in his filing cabinet’.  This suggests that when he lived in Sicily there was need to keep a pistol but he feels safer living in New York.

At the end of Alfieri's opening speech he foreshadows what is going to happen in the rest of the play, we know that it will be ‘bloody’ where he states that another lawyer, faced with a similar situation, could just watch it ‘run its bloody course’.  From this the audience knows that there will be death and, as Alfieri is speaking in ...

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