Firstly when we look at a play and see if it could be viewed as a tragedy we compare it to a more ancient kind of tragedy such as Greek tragedy. When we look at a view from the bridge against greek tragedy we try and find similarities. There is always a narrator or a chorus in a Greek tragedy who is the link between the audience and the actors in the play, in ‘a view from the bridge’ our link is Alfieri who acts as the narrator. He at all times almost steps out of the play and talks to us and is just as helpless as us in trying to stop this tragedy from happening.
What I found is that in tragedies you almost know what is going to happen at the end of the tragedy because there are clues throughout the play and also Alfieri as the link almost tells us what is going to happen, ‘I knew where he was going to end’ but he couldn’t do anything. The question always is how is it going to happen and what are they doing it for. In this instance Eddie does it because he doesn’t want to lose Catherine.
The one main thing that all tragedies have in common is greed. For instance in the view from the bridge Eddie is extremely greedy in that he wants to have Catherine all to himself when she is a grownup girl and she wants to be doing stuff for herself. Eddie however is dodgy about her getting a job and as soon as she falls in love he starts emasculating that man and finding reasons for them not to be together. ‘Go baby bring in the supper’, he is constantly calling her a baby and acting as though she is still his little child when actually she has grown up.
One of the main tragedies is that the family get split up so dramatically after the arrival and partly because of the arrival of the cousins. There is a final moment the night of the cousins arrival when the family are all together and happy for the last time ‘First Beatrice smiles, then Catherine’. This turns out to be the last time they are not fighting and there is actually peace.
In this play Beatrice loses two things. One is that she loses her husband and what she is left with is nothing because now her husband is gone she is living alone because Rodolpho and Catherine want to go live someplace on their own. She also just loses her whole family because Catherine has gone to live with her husband and Eddie’s gone and her cousin Marco has been sent back to Italy because of Eddie and she has lost all of her friends because of what Eddie has done, so basically she has lost everything because of Eddie.
Catherine has lost from this play her father figure who has been with her throughout her whole childhood. Because she had lost her family from very early on in her life and Eddie and Beatrice took her on they were a real family and they felt like a family to her. So when Eddie does all these terrible things and he eventually dies she loses another father figure and ultimately her family falls apart.
Of course the tragedy is based around what Eddie has lost and his tragic fall in life but we can’t forget all the other people who lose things. Louis and Mike lose their best friend, Marco ultimately may lose his family because now he has to go home he cannot make the money that he needs to to keep his family eating and after all that is the reason that he came to America in the first place. The only person that doesn’t really lose anything is Rodolpho because he came over to America to get an American passport and to start a life here. He is able to get his American passport and he has got this because he is marrying the love of his wife so he is the only person that doesn’t lose anything.
So a view from the bridge can be viewed from as a tragedy because of all the link it has with the Greek tragedies and the character traits that are shown throughout.
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