In A View From The Bridge, Show How The Audience's Opinion Of Eddie

In A View From The Bridge, Show How The Audience's Opinion Of Eddie

Changes.

In A View From The Bridge, Show How The Audience's Opinion Of Eddie

Changes. Refer To The Dramatic Effects Of A Few Key Scenes

A View From The Bridge is a play by Arthur Miller. It was first

produced as a one-act play in verse in 1955, and had the name of An

Italian Tragedy. The play is rooted in the late 1940's when Miller

became interested in the works and lives of the communities of the

longshoremen of New York's Brooklyn Bridge where he had previously

worked. He mentioned it in his autobiography Timebends as 'waterfront

was the Wild West, a desert beyond the law', where was populated and

worked by people who came to America seeking the 'American Dream',

wealth, work and security which their own countries could not

guarantee. This play was set in the 1950's, and at that time America

was seen as the land of opportunity for many people, to start a new

life, escape their past or just for a change, people believed America

held the key. However this was not the case, as immigrants often lived

in the most run down parts of town and found themselves out of work

and with little money to live on the or send their families at home.

Miller was concerned with this living through the depression, which

bankrupted his father, and he saw the effects on the ordinary people.

It was during this time that Miller heard a story from one of his

lawyer friend of 'a longshoremen who had "ratted" to the immigration

bureau on two brothers, his own relatives, who were living illegally

in his very home, in order to break an engagement between one of them

and his niece. ' This story became the model of A View From The Bridge

when he paid a visit to Sicily and saw the awkward situation of the

Italians without work and food, combined with his own experiences of

Italian immigrant workers in Brooklyn. Miller also wanted this play to

be a modern version of a Greek Tragedy, in which a central character

is led by fate towards an inevitable destiny; thus when the final

version of A View From The Bridge was published in 1956, he retained

much of the content of the verse but transformed it into prose. In

this essay I shall discuss how the audience's opinion of the central

character of the play, Eddie Carbone, changes and the factors that

influence them.

In the opening scene, when Eddie first appears on stage, the way he