Then when to Sicilian cousins of Beatrice, his wife, enter into this home both of which are illegal immigrants whose presence must be kept a secret from the Immigration Authorities, Eddie gets more and more perturbed. Eddie gets on well at first with the elder brother, Marco, whose whole interest is to earn money to send home to his wife and family in Sicily, but he instantly disapproves of Rodolpho, who is young, unmarried and obviously attractive to Catherine. Jealousy, contempt and frustration combine to make him desperate to destroy Rodolpho, and he finally condemns both brothers openly to the Immigration Authorities. For such a betrayal there can be no forgiveness in a community so dependent on cohesion against the Law, and so Marco kills him.
Eddie’s fate, I think, comes from a combination of his particular personality and the special community in which he lives. Being the kind of man he is, and involved in a community of Italian and Sicilian immigrants, he has no scope for solving his problem. His mind is fairly primitive; he doesn’t understand his own feelings, and he disguises them from himself. Consequently he uses his severe Italian standards for women to justify his jealous restrictions on Catherine. Because of his scrupulous moral rigor he is genuinely shocked and appalled at the suggestion that his own interest in Catherine is not purely avuncular: ‘That’s what you think of me – that I could have such thoughts?’
If Eddie is meant to represent everyman, does this mean that Miller believes all men love their nieces (those who have nieces)? Of course not. What Miller does suggest is that we have basic impulses, which civilization has seen as harmful to society, and taught us to control. We have self-destructive urges, too, but normally we deny these. Eddie does not really understand his improper desire, and therefore is unable to hide it from those around him or from the audience. In him we see the primitive impulse naked, as it were: this explains Alfieri's puzzling remark that Eddie "allowed himself to be perfectly known".
Clearly, Eddie is, in the classical Greek sense, the protagonist of the play. Alfieri tells us this at the end of his opening address: "This one's name was Eddie Carbone..." Eddie is the subject of Alfieri's narrative, and all other characters are seen in relation to him. We are shown at first a good man who seems perfectly happy: he has the dignity of a job he does well, he is liked in the close-knit community of Red Hook, he has the love of wife and foster-daughter/niece, and his doubts about Catherine's prospective job are not very serious.
At the end Eddie does not gain our admiration exactly, or regret because what he has done is indefensible and he will not admit, but there is a certain wonder in it.
The Italian or Sicilian element is at the heart of the situation. He and the people around him are not sophisticated Americans. They are immigrants, bringing with them the primitive way of life of Calabria or Sicily, both in its primitive virtues and its elemental brutal lawlessness. They are poor and hard working, knowing what it is like to starve. They care about family and their responsibilities within their family. They ‘have respect’ for women and think strictness a virtue. Eddie has a primitive man’s vies of the purposes for which marriage was intended, and cannot believe that United States law will allow a young girl to be married to a man who, he suspects, ‘ain’t right.’
However it would be wrong of me to over – emphasize the extent to which Eddie is merely a product of his environment and his origins. So we must then salute in Eddie a strong and defiant will that is his own, and recognition of this leads us on to another favourite yet often fatal quality in Miller’s heroes – the fact that they cannot or will not ‘settle for half’. Most of us do settle for half rather than destroy ourselves, and, as Alfieri says at the end of the play, ‘it is better to settle for half – it must be’. Yet a man, or woman, who is true to him or herself, who goes all out, who will compromise, demands respect, even, in some cases, awe.