Alfieri in A View From the Bridge by Arhtur Miller

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Alfieri in A View From the Bridge by Arhtur Miller In the play 'A View From The Bridge' the character of Alfieri is not widely used as a person in the play, but as a narrator and as a scene divider The play is actually only divided up into 2 acts rather than scenes. Alfieri is the mechanism by which the play unfolds. Readers can relate to Alfieri for many reasons. They can respect his opinion, he is a Lawyer, but they can also like his character and can connect with his position in the play. He is under pressure from being told all the other characters' secrets and he needs to talk to someone, which is why the soliloquies are involved. He comments on the action in previous scenes and gives hints as to the action in the next, "He worked on the piers when there was work", "After they had eaten, the cousins came." In doing this, he exercises a key role of the chorus character, he comments but doesn't intervene, "I could have finished the whole story that afternoon." This also gives the reader the feeling that Alfieri is simply re-telling the story, because he speaks in the past tense, except when he's talking to another actor in the play. Alfieri by profession is a Lawyer. The community in the play respects Alfieri, and views him as the dependable figure in the play. As Alfieri reminds us in his introductory speech, lawyers are only thought of in connection with disasters. _____________________ At the start of the play Alfieri introduces himself as a lawyer originating from Sicily, Italy but who moved to Red Hook, New York when he was 25 years old, due to the uncertainty of what may happen to him because of the risk of the Mafia. He talks of how many people in the Red Hook district are from Sicily and he states that he isn't trusted as a lawyer due to the fact that the law was not a friendly idea in Sicily since the Greeks were beaten.

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