Eddie Carbone Essay

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IOP Essay Name: Venneth Chua (9) Class: 3.15 Nahum Eddie the Tragic Hero As seen from the play A View from the Bridge, Eddie Carbone is portrayed as a “tragic hero”. “Tragic heroes” are people who make some mistake or have something destructive tendency that leads to them causing their own destruction. Several other examples would be Macbeth and King Lear by Shakespeare. The similarity between Eddie Carbone and the other “tragic heroes” would be that they all shared an error of judgement, or simply a tragic flaw, whereby it caused a negative effect to the person himself instead. In the case of this play, the reader could argue that Eddie's tragic flaw is either denial or, to begin with, the incestuous feelings for his niece, Catherine. Most of the time, the damage caused by a tragic hero's downfall usually hurts not just himself but often his community and family around him are strongly affected as well. Once again, Eddie's betrayal does both of these things. Firstly, his community was affected because Marco shouted to all the neighbours in the surrounding scene that Eddie killed his children, or so he claimed. Marco made these claims because he was so furious at Eddie’s betrayal and hence wanted to make Eddie seem as a villainous character. This betrayal also strongly impacted his small family, which consists of Beatrice and Catherine. Both of them felt it was pretty unreasonable for Eddie to beforehand allow them to stay at his house, but now turn against them and caused them to be caught by the country’s Immigration officers which he notified them. As much as Beatrice opposes to it, she loves Eddie so much that she follows whatever Eddie’s decision is. However, on the other hand, Catherine has an extremely negative reaction. It was a heavy blow dealt to Catherine that her lover, Rodolpho, has been caught and hates Eddie for betraying them. Another
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