Justice - A View From A Bridge

Ask yourself what is jutsice? How is justice given? These are the only few questions we can ask about justice for there are many more.

In our society today there are lots of versions of justice: different culture have different beliefs and ideas about this. Each of us has our own views and opinions. Although there is a set of laws that are made for our society today, where they are made and passed in parliament.Those are the laws we must abide by and not go against, otherwise there will be consequences.

However this is not the case when we look at Miller's play 'A View From The Bridge'. In the play there is a lawyer in his mid fifties called, ALffieri, he believes in the law and abides by it but he knows there are other laws that people abide by as well. One of these people is the protaginist of the story, Eddie Carbone. Now Eddies Carbone in this plays by his own set of rules for example when his wife's cousins came to the USA and stayed as illegal immigrants he told Cathereing (his niece) and Beatrice (his wife) this: 'You can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away', so here he is basically saying that not to snitch on someone because once you give it out that will be it and you can't turn the clock back. However, coming to the end of the play he goes back on his words so this makes him a hypocrite because it shows that he has one set of rules for himself and another et of rules for everybody else.

Eddie Carbone being American Italian, the play also touches on the justice system of the Sicilians, where their law controls the people and not the government's laws. In Sicily family loyalty is one of the most important policies they believe in . once you betray them or shame your family in anyway they will disown you, not onyl that if you have done this in such a way they can not bear it they will take any sort of honour you had and (or) kill you. On the other hand if someone outside your family has shamed, injusred or even killed anyone in your family, youw would not take it up with the police or any form of official legal help; they'll sort it out themselves even if it meant killing the other family. This was the same situation for the Ancient Greeks. Obivously they didn't have a justice system like ours todaay so if someone was killed, the victim's family would have had to decide if they were to take revenge on the people who had killed them. I have written about the Ancient Greeks, as the play is based on ideas and themes of an Ancient Greek play. So both Ancient Greeks and the Sicilians both share the way of living by a tooth for toothe and eye for eye.

So where does this leave our societies beliefs in justice and the laws of justice?