How far is Eddie Carbone to blame for his downfall.

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How far is Eddie Carbone to blame for his downfall

‘The view from the Bridge’ was written in 1953 by the play writer Arthur Miller. The book was written as an answer to the McCarthy witch trials; which was when thousands of people were wrongly accused of being communists. Arthur Miller himself was brought before the un-American committee and he was accused of being a communist. He didn’t snitch on others and was blacklisted, that is what this play is about, loyalty.

 This play is like a Greek tragedy. This is because the play includes the three main things that are included in a Greek tragedy, protagonist, hamartia and catharsis. A protagonist is a tragic hero. In this play the protagonist is Eddie Carbone. The hero is not always all good he also has fatal flaws; with Eddie his fatal flaw was his undying love and overprotection of his adopted daughter/niece, Catherine. Hamartia is a fall from grace. At the beginning of the play Eddie has a lot of honour and respect from ‘his’ family. However by the end of the play he is despised by everyone; including the other local villagers, he died being hated especially by Catherine. Eddie was a father figure to Catherine at the beginning, but when his feelings and affection towards her came through a lot of the respect Catherine had for Eddie was lost she thought of him as a rat; “he’s a rat!” and he was no longer her father figure. Catharsis is cleansing. This is where the audience learn a very important lesson but without the punishment of having to learn it. In ‘The view from the bridge’ the audience learn to settle for half; to sit down and work things out they also learn that truth is not as bad as blood. Eddie’s downfall has taught the audience not to have inappropriate feelings and let them show because it can lead to loosing everything including your life.

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The word ‘view’ can mean looking; someone watching all that is happening. It can also mean an opinion; meaning it is individual. There are a lot of views/opinions in this play. Some of them are; honour; Eddie believed he was the head of the family/house; he should be honoured and respected. Loyalty; at the beginning Eddie told a story of how you should be loyal to yourself, your friends and your family; don’t snitch on them. Even though Eddie has told this story of loyalty he was not loyal towards Rodolfo, Marci and the two relatives of the Lipari ...

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