A View From the Bridge: Marco and Eddie’s Character Relationship

How does the relations between Marco and Eddie change throughout the play?

In the play “A View from the Bridge”, the relation between Eddie and Marco changes a lot and worsen as it gets to the end. From the beginning of the play, Eddie already proved his dislike towards Beatrice’s cousins from cousin from coming by telling her to not give a room to them and also saying it’s unnecessary to buy new table cloths to welcome them.
When Marco first arrived, he thought that Eddie was a kind, friendly man and so he had his trust in him and therefore, sent twenty dollars back immediately (believing that he had a stable condition here and could certainly support the his family for the long term).

As the play develops, Rodolfo’s relations with Catherine tighten and lead to Eddie’s jealousy of Rodolfo being so close to Catherine. His dislike of the pair of them increased as Rodolfo tried to go out with Catherine to Broadway. Because of this, Eddie tried to insult Marco by saying that when he went back to Italy, there may be “plenty surprises” and added “…they count the kids and there’s a couple extra then when they left”. This is aiming to insult Marco by suggesting that his wife might be doing prostitution during his absence at work. This is when Marco took notice of the fact that Eddie wasn’t so friendly. Later on, when Rodolfo and Catherine still haven’t lost interest in each other, Eddie pretended to teach Rodolfo how to box, but was actually trying to humiliate his weakness and lack of masculinity. He hurt Rodolfo and therefore Marco felt the responsibility to intervene with what Eddie is doing. This led to the chair scene where the stage direction shows the change in authority between Eddie and Marco through “face to face… tension… raised like a weapon…glare of warning…smile of triumph…Eddie’s grin vanished”. It is the turning point which leads Eddie to become a traitor and report the illegal immigrants (which at the beginning he described as a possible threat that others would do).

When Eddie found out that Rodolfo and Catherine had a sexual intercourse, he was very angry about the illegal immigrants. He tried to find another reason apart from the illegal immigration issue to prevent Rodolfo and Catherine from marrying. There was no way to prevent this marriage apart from reporting them to the immigration department and so he did so. This contradicted to his earlier saying in the play: “I don’t care what question it is. You - don’t - know- nothin’ (won’t be questioned if they are captured)… Vinny… no more than fourteen… he snitched… he was crazy after…”. This sparked rage in Marco and it was shown under the words “He killed my children…stole the food from my children”.

Through his anger, although Alfieri persuaded him not to kill Eddie earlier, Marco turned the knife which Eddie tried to kill him with against Eddie. It led to the final ending to the entire climax which Miller has produced. Through conflict and the urge to revenge, the story ends with Marco turning back the murder Eddie had planned. Power didn’t end up on either one of them because Eddie died and Marco was deported back to Italy. Too much power and power-struggle leads to the conflicts and consequences.