This year you will be studying ‘A View from the Bridge’. Use this blog to share ideas and ask questions.
Take a look at this interview with Arthur Miller:
This year you will be studying ‘A View from the Bridge’. Use this blog to share ideas and ask questions.
Take a look at this interview with Arthur Miller:
Useful sites for ‘A View from the Bridge’ by Arthur Miller:
http://www.eriding.net/amoore/gcse/viewfromthebridge.htm
http://www.bookrags.com/wiki/A_View_from_the_Bridge
http://www.skoool.ie/skoool/examcentre_sc.asp?id=2603
http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/viewbridge/
A View From the Bridge – Arthur Miller
Plot Summary
Alfieri is a lawyer in his fifties who is the narrator. Eddie Carbone is forty and a longshoreman working on the docks near Brooklyn Bridge. Eddie is married to a woman called Beatrice. Catherine is Beatrice’s niece. She lives with Eddie and Beatrice. She announces that she wants to leave school as she as has been offered a job in a plumbing company as secretary. Eddie is very protective of Catherine and wants her to stay on and get an education. Alfieri interrupts the dialogue to announce how Eddie was a good man in a life that was hard. Eddie’s cousins Marco and Rodolpho arrive from Italy to stay. Marco is married with three children. He has left Italy in search of work. Rodolpo is not married, he dreams of being rich and returning to Italy with a motorcycle. Marco tells them that when you have no wife you dream. Catherine and Rodolpho begin to date and Eddie gets annoyed, as he is very possessive. Eddie objects to the relationship between Catherine and Rodolpho because secretly he is jealous. Beatrice struggles to get Catherine to face up to her responsibilities and make her own mind up. Catherine is deeply influenced by Eddie and does everything he wants. Beatrice warns Catherine that she is a grown up woman and to act like that in front of Eddie and not act like a baby.
Continue reading:
http://www.skoool.ie/skoool/examcentre_sc.asp?id=2603
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/english_literature/dramaviewbridge/viewbridgeplotact.shtml
A View from the Bridge Arthur Miller
Character Analysis
Eddie Carbone
Eddie Carbone is the tragic protagonist of The View from the Bridge. He is constantly self-interested, wanting to promote and protect his innocence. Eddie creates a fictional fantasy world where his absurd decisions make sense—where calling the Immigration Bureau in the middle of an Italian community that prides itself on protecting illegal immigrants has no repercussions. In Eddie’s world, he imagines protecting Catherine from marriage or any male relationship and wants her for himself. While Eddie wavers and switches between communal and state laws and cultures, his motivations do not change. Eddie constantly looks out for himself at the expense of others and is ruled by personal love and guilt.
There are several moments in the text where the audience is given clues that Eddie’s love for Catherine may not be normal. For example, when Catherine lights Eddie’s cigar in the living room, it is an event that gives Eddie unusual pleasure. This possibly warm and affectionate act between niece and uncle has phallic suggestions. Depending on interpretation by the actors, this moment many have more or less sexual undertones. Eddie’s great attention to his attractive niece and impotence in his own marital relationship immediately makes this meaning clear. Although Eddie seems unable to understand his feelings for his niece until the end of the play, other characters are aware. Beatrice is the first to express this possibility in her conversation with Catherine. Alfieri also realizes Eddie’s feelings during his first conversation with Eddie. Eddie does not comprehend his feelings until Beatrice clearly articulates his desires in the conclusion of the play, “You want somethin’ else, Eddie, and you can never have her!”
Eddie does not realize his feeling for Catherine because he has constructed an imagined world where he can suppress his urges. This suppression is what devastates Eddie. Because he has no outlet for his feelings—even in his own conscious mind—Eddie transfers his energy to a hatred of Marco and Rodolpho and causes him to act completely irrationally. Eddie’s final need to secure or retrieve his good name from Marco is a result of Eddie’s failure to protect Catherine from Marco. Eddie fails in his life, but seeks redemption and victory in death. By avenging Marco, Eddie believes he will regain his pride in the community—another wholly self-interested act. Eddie escaped restraint because he escaped all thoughts of other people or the community at large. Eddie’s “wholeness” is a whole interest in himself. Eddie’s tragic flaw is the bubble, the constructed world he exists within, but is unable to escape or recognize.
Alfieri
Alfieri is the symbolic bridge between American law and tribal laws. Alfieri, an Italian-American, is true to his ethnic identity. He is a well-educated man who studies and respects American law, but is still loyal to Italian customs. The play told from the viewpoint of Alfieri, the view from the bridge between American and Italian cultures who attempts to objectively give a picture of Eddie Carbone and the 1950s Red Hook, Brooklyn community. Alfieri represents the difficult stretch, embodied in the Brooklyn Bridge, from small ethnic communities filled with dock laborers to the disparate cosmopolitan wealth and intellectualism of Manhattan. The old and new worlds are codified in the immigrant-son Alfieri. From his vantage point, Alfieri attempts to present an un-biased and reasonable view of the events of the play and make clear the greater social and moral implications in the work.
From his narration, it seems that Alfieri has decided to tell the story for his own reasons as much as anyone else’s. He does not find a conclusion after telling the Carbone story, but tells it nonetheless and he speaks and reveals his honest view of the facts. He is cast as the chorus part in Eddie’s tragedy. Alfieri informs the audience and provides commentary on what is happening in the story. The description of the people within the play and narration at the beginning of every scene change helps to distinguish the short chapters of the tale. Alfieri is fairly inconsequential in the action of the play in general, but more importantly frames the play as a form of a modern fairy tale. Alfieri admittedly cannot help Eddie Carbone, but must powerlessly watch the tragic events unfold before him. There is no illusion of reality, Alfieri purposely breaks the fourth wall and talks to the audience during the reenactment of the story. Alfieri is in many ways like Arthur Miller, when he first heard the tale of the Longshoreman. He is the teller of and incredible story that he cannot change.
Rean on …http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/viewbridge/canalysis.html