A View From The Bridge Greek Tragedy Analysis

In a View From the Bridge, Miller tries to create a modern age greek tragedy. A greek tragedy is defined as a play in which the protagonist, usually a man of importance and outstanding personal qualities, falls to disaster through the combination of a personal failing and circumstances which he cannot deal. Miller portrays this through the character of Eddie who is understandably the ‘man of importance’ at least within his household. The character of Eddie also ’falls to disaster’ at the end of the play, after being stabbed. Throughout, I think that, reasonably, the audience have sympathy for Eddie but only to a limited extent because of the way he treated other characters and his lack of compassion for his family. The definition of sympathy …show more content…
At the beginning, Eddie is simply an overprotective father figure for Catherine and the audience understand this because he is protecting her; they sympathise because he is behaving as any normal father figure should. He likes to know ‘Where you goin’ all dressed up?’ And the audience feel his discomfort with Catherine growing up. At the end of the play, Eddie’s death is expected because Miller has created this modern day tragedy, but most of the audience do feel slight sympathy for him because they feel sorrow for his sake that he didn’t manage to clear up his act before it was too late. Whilst they don’t necessarily ‘feel sorry for him’, they do share his emotions of ‘sorrow or anguish’ because after sharing the discomfort of Catherine growing up, the audience do have some understanding of the roots of his actions as it started with merely him being overprotective and just spun out of control from there. After a while, Miller shows that Eddie’s feelings for Catherine become slightly uncontrollable, a ‘circumstance which he cannot deal’ which the audience may feel sympathy …show more content…
This could be taken into account for how the audience feels too as it could be conveyed that overall, Miller wrote the play so the audience is supposed to have more than one view on whether they actually have sympathy for Eddie or not. For example, the audience start to have sympathy for Eddie as they share his sorrow of Catherine growing up. This is the root of the situation that eventually got uncontrollable but if the audience sympathise for him here, they might have some sympathy with him at the end, as they share emotions of sorrow for him because he let it spin out of control before he could stop it. On the other hand, the audience doesn’t feel sympathy because they begin to feel frustration as Eddie leads himself to his fate. As a tragedy would end, Eddie dies, but by account of his own knife only used by Marco. This could suggest it is a symbol of his own self-destructive path that he lead to end up in this situation; which he didn’t help to prevent. As the audience feel frustrated, they simply cannot share his emotions of sorrow for himself as there was plenty of opportunity to control the