In American Pastoral and A View From the Bridge, Philip Roth and Arthur Miller respectively present family life as a tense domain of activity where relational ties are easily stretched and broken. . Setting their novels in Rimrock, New Jersey, and Brooklyn, the authors offer local, interrelated dramas to symbolize the tragedy that unfolds when families begin to turn against each other. American Pastoral revolves around the life of Seymour "Swede" Levov and his disappearance after his daughter bombs a post office in revolt against the Vietnam War. A View From the Bridge focuses on Eddie Carbone and his desperate struggle against masculinity within the family, ultimately leading to his murder. The novels juxtapose ideas of the perfect American dream and parasitic relationships; betrayal ends up eating away at family trust to demonstrate that arguments and tensions occur in vain and leave us with nothing. We are our own greatest enemies. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Both novels argue that ultimately, within a family, we fight against ourselves and are therefore our own downfalls. American Pastoral suggests that within a family there is a lack of trust and that, behind the facades, we do not really know what our loved ones think. Roth writes that "you fight your shallowness, your shallowness, to try to address people without unreal expectations," which seems to imply that pretense is nonetheless present, but is buried to appear nonexistent. suggesting a duality among humans. This duality then results in a lack of trust, particularly within families, because we assume that the appearances of loved ones are serious. Roth supports this argument with the glove motif, as Rita Cohen proclaims to The Swede: “A whole family and all that really matters is the skin. Ectoderm. Surface. But what's underneath, you have no idea. Indeed, Swede owns the glove factory, a business based on camouflage, and Dawn undergoes a facelift to maintain her former model appearance. However, while this seems to confirm that there is no trust, perhaps the opposite is true: there is too much trust. In a family where one grows up with people of the same blood, one takes a kind of faith for granted, which then leads to disruptions. Roth writes: “they cry intensely, the reliable father whose center is the source of all order… – for whom keeping chaos at bay had been the intuitively chosen path to certainty… – and the daughter who is chaos himself. » This strange balance between order and chaos, father and daughter, resonating with yin and yang, highlights that although the two fit together perfectly, they are in conflict. Even though Merry thought she was rebelling against America and the Vietnam War, she was actually destroying the Vietnam War. the man who based his entire life on America and the dream it promised, providing the narrative with layers of order, manifested in gloves, facelift and superficiality, and the chaos beneath. In the end, however, Roth completely overturns this although the Swede can blame Merry and; the bombing for his downfall, the cancer in him kills him anyway, which perhaps leads to the conclusion that we can offload the problems onto the close-knit family members, but in reality the problem is ourselves. And so that extends to American identity as a whole. in the sense that he is his own greatest enemy. Facing thequestion of terrorism, Merry, to rebel against American action in Vietnam, blew up his hometown and killed an innocent man. Internationally, America is attacked by terrorists from countries attacked by America, providing a cyclical structure. Roth then suggests that families feign trust when, underneath, they attack each other and offload their own problems. A View From the Bridge approaches the issue of dumping in the same way as placing the taboos of inappropriate love, homophobia and xenophobia as the causes of Eddie's death, when in reality the problem is its own ideology. When Eddie dies, the most obvious reason seems to lie in Marco and Rodolpho's reporting to the immigration office and the tensions caused by Rodolpho's relationship with Catherine. At the very beginning of the play, Eddie is portrayed as an overprotective uncle as he tells his niece "don't piss me off, Katie, you walk wavy!" and when his engagement to Rodolpho begins, Eddie professes that "he gives me the heeby-jeebes." Particularly when Eddie "kisses [Catherine] on the mouth", a psychoanalytic reading could refer to a reverse Oedipus complex, in which the father desires to possess the daughter. Again, when Eddie explains that Rodolpho “sings, he cooks, he could make dresses…” and therefore determines that he is homosexual, a clearly homophobic reading can be drawn; Together, these interpretations seem to offer enough evidence to suggest that Eddie falls because of both his inappropriate love for Catherine and his homophobia. However, just as Roth showed that the Swede's downfall was not due to the Vietnam War or even terrorism, but to destruction within the family, Miller shows that Eddie's death was due to his own obsession with masculinity and control over the family. In a 1987 BBC interview, Miller said that Eddie "may believe that Rodolpho is gay, but he has to, he has to, so he can distance himself from his own problems", making him evaluates both books perfectly: the characters take their problems out on them. closest family members around them for protection. Indeed, Miller wrote many of his plays in the 1950s, a time when communism was believed to be widespread in America and Senator Joseph McCathy's attempts against it were commonplace. McCarthy published a blacklist of all communist sympathizers in America, conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and to assemble such a list he conducted investigations and interrogations, one being that of Arthur Miller himself; Miller, however, challenged the court to name anyone. And so, just as his play The Crucible can be read from this perspective to the extent that the Salem witch trials correspond to the trials of the 1950s, A View From the Bridge can be read in the same way. Eddie betrays his family by reporting Marco, Rodolpho and the other cousins ​​to the police, which angers Marco, leading to Eddie's murder. In fact, by portraying Eddie as a man who acts the opposite of Miller himself, by betraying his family, Miller is emphasizing that when we turn against our own family, we bring about our own demise. Merry did not rebel against America's involvement in Vietnam but against her father's life, and Eddie did not act morally in denouncing the cousins ​​but committed suicide; Alfieri found “his death unnecessary”. Miller and Roth thus reinforce the idea that the most important problem in our lives is not terrorism, nor homosexuality, nor immigration, but our own prejudices and ideologies, caused byourselves. The two novels then call into question the realism of achieving the American dream: leading a perfect family. In American Pastoral, Roth begins by describing the Swede as the perfect American man: "the name was magical, as was the abnormal face...none possessed anything remotely resembling the stiff-jawed, unfeeling Viking mask... like Seymour. » Indeed, even in the chapter entitled “The Fall”, the Swede remains stereotypically perfect. The repetition of simple active verbs in "he walked a little and stopped, walked a little and stopped...and that's how it went for hours" suggests a basic, relaxed life, owning land and cattle, which was the pinnacle of life. American dream. This is evaluated in the anaphoric list "I must marry a beautiful girl named Dwyer." I have to run a company that my father built…I have to live in the most beautiful place in the world”; for the Swede, until the moment Merry committed a terrorist act, “he had succeeded”. However, Roth also comments on the realism of achieving this condition, implying that beyond the attractions of the 1960s, the American dream was just a facade. Across America in the 1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson, after Kennedy's failures, promised to initiate reforms to provide "a helping hand, not a handout": "Medicare" for the elderly , “Head Start” for children, “Job Corps” for the elderly. the unemployed. However, beyond this seemingly dreamlike society, the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive suggested that America would lose the Vietnam War and great riots tore America apart. So with the novel set in this era, Roth questions the surface. He writes that the Swede "was now by far the stronger partner, [Dawn] was now by far the weaker", seeming to emphasize the stereotypical masculinity of the American family; however, the irony is that Dawn distances herself from the Swede by having an affair with Orcutt and so she is actually the stronger partner. Again, later, when the characters are at a dinner party, the reader is told that "The Orcutts had three boys and two girls, all adults now, living and working in New York", information which is particularly reminiscent of the Swede at the beginning from the novel: "He had brought pictures of his three boys...which boy was better at lacrosse...who was as good at soccer as he was at soccer." The reader sees here a dramatic change from the relaxed, focussed man family to, at the end of the novel, "a captive confined in a box without a future where he was not to think... not to think... not to think"; the repetition and diction emphasize the constriction of the Swede's life after that; he trusted Dawn and settled down The motif of trust circulates extensively in Roth's novel, and is particularly appropriate during the Watergate crisis of the 1970s. In 1972, President Nixon ordered the break-in within the Democratic Party. The National Committee wiretapped the phone of party chairman Lawrence O'Brien, triggering a constitutional crisis over its distrust of the American president. So as the characters sit around the table during “the summer of the Watergate hearings,” Roth suggests that trusting is a vulnerable and ultimately fatal act. The Swede begins life launching himself into the American dream with Merry and Dawn, only for his daughter to turn to terrorism and his whereabouts to be covered up by the woman he was having an affair with. with, and for, his wife to commit adultery in their kitchen with her plastic surgeon, and for them to build a house while Dawn plans to divorce the Swede. Roth.