A View from the Bridge York Notes

When Alfieri tells Eddie, ‘Sometimes God mixes up the people’, he implies that there may be a greater force than ourselves directing our lives. This indicates Alfieri believes that sometimes individuals have little control over emotions because they become so powerful they can lead people into places they shouldn’t go. Miller is presenting us with Eddie, a simple, uneducated man, who appears to be in a maelstrom from which there is no escape.

When Alfieri says to Eddie, ‘I want you to listen to me’, the audience is aware that Alfieri is warning Eddie about the consequences of allowing his destiny to push him on the path to destruction. He tells him, ‘but through the years – there is too much love for the daughter. . .’ Alfieri’s language is controlled, thoughtful and careful because he doesn’t want to hurt Eddie. Eddie does not understand Alfieri’s comments. Alfieri is aware that Eddie has not chosen this path deliberately. Miller is asking the audience to consider the implications embedded in Alfieri’s words. He is suggesting if this unnatural relationship develops there will be tragic consequences.

From now Alfieri builds on what he has said. Through the lawyer’s thoughts, Miller is moving into very dark territory. When Alfieri says ‘The child has to grow up and go away and the man has to learn to forget’ the audience understands that he is pleading with Eddie to give Catherine her freedom and, incidentally, to liberate himself also. The words ‘learn to forget’ are significant. He is not telling Eddie to forget Catherine but to forget his emotional attachment to her which is his unfortunate fate.

We are never absolutely certain that Alfieri agrees that predestination controls the human race. Perhaps he does or perhaps he is attempting to soften his advice by telling Eddie that the situation is not of his making. Does Miller himself agree that we are in the grip of supernatural forces that rule our lives? We can’t be sure because Miller would say that his characters speak for themselves.

In Alfieri’s speech that begins ‘There are times...’ the audience is aware of the lawyer’s own sense of helplessness. Miller’s language is almost melodramatic ‘I could see every step coming, step after step, like a dark figure walking down a hall, towards a certain door’ but nonetheless is very powerful and full of suspense and foreboding – as Miller uses personification to suggest Eddie’s fate stalks him like a ‘dark figure’. This whole speech shows how sympathetic Alfieri is to Eddie’s predicament. And we also feel sympathy for Alfieri when he says he is ‘powerless to stop it’. When he visits the ‘wise old woman’ the only advice she can give him is, ‘Pray for him...’ After that Miller’s image of Alfieri as he ‘waited here’ shows a character who feels impotent while observing the whirlpool of Eddie’s emotions.

Earlier in Act 1, Alfieri addresses the audience, ‘Eddie Carbone had never expected to have a destiny...Now, as the weeks passed, there was a future, there was a trouble that would not go away’. Eddie has no comprehension of the forces that influence him or indeed of the fate that awaits him and Miller now creates an unrelenting force that increases through the rest of the play until we arrive at the final, inevitable tragic moment.