The Shakespeare tragedy is when the main character is heading towards the inevitable but having many warnings on the way. Normally the main characters have on big fatal flaw and many other smaller but also important ones. The main characters are always born in royalty, nobility or become a general. Traditionally the narrator in the play foreshadows that the main character will die or very rarely bad things will happen to him instead of dying.
Meanwhile in a tragedy of the common man can be said to be invented by Arthur Miller. We see mainly the same ideas of the character dying or having bad things happening to him or her but instead of the character being born in royalty, the character is being born in the working class and lives in it for the rest of their life. The effect created would be that the audience relates better with the character being working class than royalty, nobility or being a general, this is because most of us are born and live in the working class not royalty or nobility. Also that since the character is not royalty we empathize much more with them.
In Arthur Miller’s play ‘A View from the Bridge’ we see that his main character, is Eddie Carbone. Eddie is an average man who is in the working class. His job is longshoreman in the dock from Brooklyn Bridge. We can believe that his biggest fatal flaw was that he cared too much for Catherine and by caring too much for her he ended up dying. The other flaws Arthur Miller gave Eddie was that he was too jealous of Rodolpho, and he was too proud to forgive Marco when Rodolpho apologized. His jealousy, pride and that he cared is what made him die but all of that was foreshadowed by Alfieri our narrator in the play.
The effect of Miller’s play would be that as the audience we would be curious of the character of Eddie since we see him at the beginning of the play being a bit over protective with Catherine. Which would later the curiosity would become dislike towards Eddie because he does not see that Catherine is not a little girl anymore and that his wife is right about what he is doing wrong but he does not want to accept it.
Miller by using the “tragedy of the common man” shows us the audience a lot of what is going to happen but still leave curiosity of what will really happen to all of the characters.
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