A view from the bridge essay

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English CW-Essay

Look at the opening scene between Eddie and Catherine (Pages 5 – 12) and the scene in which Catherine has just returned from the picture house. (Pages 26 – 31). How do these scenes foreshadow the breakdown in Eddie and Catherine’s Relationship?

A View from The Bridge is a play set in the 1940s in America. The themes of the play are love, honour, poverty, and mainly immigration. These are all factors that contribute to the breakdown between Eddie and Catherine’s relationship. In both the key scenes, there is growing conflict between the two main characters. These are Catherine and Eddie. There is the main characters wife’s cousins who migrate illegally from Italy, one of whom that falls in love with Eddies niece, Catherine. The breakdown of the relationship between Eddie and Catherine can be foreshadowed through the genre, dramatic irony, context, language, characterisation, themes and stage directions.

The genre of this play is tragedy. This means that the central character, the protagonist dies at the end. The protagonist who is Eddie is fine but his/her fate is imperfect because of a flaw in the character. This flaw in Eddie is quite simple. His flaw is that he cannot let go of his niece and he is very overprotective. The breakdown of the relationship can be foreshadowed through the genre being a tragedy because we know that at some point in the play, there will be problems arising due to Eddie being too attached to Catherine and her growing less and less fond of him. The one thing he cannot take is the fact that his power over Catherine goes, and that’s exactly what happens.

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Eddie is overprotective and this is an increasing problem. Catherine is a maturing girl and demands her right to independence.  Eddie is a dominant figure in their relationship and wants it to remain that way. At first, Catherine listens to Eddie and does what he wants, for example, Eddie Says “come over here”, and straight away she comes to sit next to him. Eddie commands her, and he commands her because he knows for certain that she will listen to him. This shows that whenever Eddie has commanded her in the past she has listened. This goes to show ...

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