Justice is one of the key themes of the play. Alfieri announces this in his opening speech, telling us that: “Justice is very important here”. But the tragedy of the play is that Eddie’s sense of what is just does not tally with Alfieri’s, or, for that matter, Marco’s. Alfieri tells Eddie that “The law is only a word for what has a right to happen.” But words are not Eddie’s things. His failure to express his thoughts and feelings is apparent in his inarticulate outbursts: Catherine gives him “the willies” (with its sinister levels of meaning) and Rodolpho the “heebie-jeebies”. Indeed, trying to put his finger on his problems with Rodolpho he can say only: “The guy ain’t right” and “He’s like a weird” where the strangely modern register and the substitution of an adjective for a noun express his confusion and lack of ability to express himself. Language is a problem for Eddie, and if the Law is only a “word”, as Alfieri tells us, Eddie is always going to be inevitably distanced from it.
Alfieri tells us that “Eddie Carbone had never expected to have a destiny”. Indeed, he presents him as “as good a man as he had to be in a life that was hard and even”. But the arrival of the brothers, Marco and Rodolpho is the catalyst which speeds up the reaction which Alfieri is “powerless” to stop and which is inevitable from the outset. Eddie’s destiny is apparent from the start of the play in his refusal to tell himself the truth; indeed, Catherine tells him: “I mean it, Eddie, sometimes I don’t understand you”. This confusion, deliberate or otherwise, persists throughout the play. Beatrice, the speaker of truths in the play, uncovers the most powerful truth, but only at the very end. Eddie screams: “I want my name”, desperate to recover his reputation after Marco has spat in his face. Beatrice simply replies: “You want something else Eddie, and you can never have her!” The power of this phrase hangs on the last word; right up to the point where Beatrice says “her” the audience doesn’t quite believe that she will tell the truth quite as painfully.
The tragedy is inevitable because Eddie fails to learn from his mistakes and in this sense he is a typical tragic hero. Rodolpho explains the problem to Catherine in the form of a powerful metaphor: “If I take in my hands a little bird. And she grows and wishes to fly.” The image of flight, of freedom, is a clear reference to Catherine’s desire to move on, and yet Eddie is smothering her. Catherine also refuses to learn, failing to heed Beatrice’s advice: “you can’t act the way you act”. And when the full horror of the tragedy unfolds, Catherine is left cursing and despairing: “He bites people when they sleep. He comes when nobody’s lookin’ and poisons decent people.” The venomous metaphor is a sharp reminder of their complete failure to compromise; and this failure is inevitable, unlike Alfieri, they are unable to “settle for half”.
At the end of the play, Alfieri tells us that Eddie: “allowed himself to be wholly known” and he mourns him “with a certain alarm.” The alarm is a sign of danger. And the world is dangerous because of the inevitability of tragedy. “Two thousand years of distrust” have not changed the world: the fate of certain human beings will always be unavoidable. No matter how much Alfieri may convince us that “it is better to settle for half, it must be!” this is a play where, like Alfieri, the audience is force to sit and watch it run its inevitable “bloody course”.
