In American Pastoral and A View From the Bridge, Philip Roth and Arthur Miller respectively present family life as a tense realm of activity in which relational bonds are easily stretched and broken. Setting their novels in Rimrock, New Jersey, and Brooklyn, the authors offer local and related drama to symbolize the tragedy that unfolds when families begin to attack each other. American Pastoral revolves around the life of Seymour "Swede" Levov and his death after his daughter blows up a post office in revolt against the Vietnam War. A View From the Bridge centers on Eddie Carbone and his desperate struggle against masculinity within his family, which ultimately leads to his murder. The novels juxtapose ideas of the perfect American dream and parasitic relationships; betrayal ultimately undermines family trust to show that arguments and tensions happen in vain and leave us with nothing. We are our greatest enemies. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay. Both novels argue that, ultimately, within a family, we are fighting against ourselves and therefore are our own downfalls. The American Pastoral suggests that trust is lacking within a family and that, behind the facade, we don't really know what the people closest to us think. Roth writes that “you fight your superficiality, your superficiality, to try to reach people without unreal expectations,” which seems to imply that fictions are still present, but that they are buried so as to appear non-existent, suggesting a duality between human beings. This duality therefore presents a lack of trust, particularly among families, as we assume the appearance of loved ones is serious. Roth supports this thesis with the glove motif, as Rita Cohen proclaims to the Swede: “A whole family and the only thing you really care about is your skin. Ectoderm. Surface. But what's underneath, you have no idea. In fact, Swede owns the glove factory, a business based on hiding things, and Dawn undergoes a makeover to maintain her former model look. However, although this seems to confirm that there is no trust, perhaps the opposite is true: there is too much trust. In a family, growing up with people of the same blood, a sort of faith is taken for granted, and this then leads to disintegration. 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 path chosen by intuition towards certainty... - and the daughter who It's chaos itself." between order and chaos, father and daughter, resonating with yin and yang, highlights the fact that while the two fit perfectly, they are in conflict. Although Merry believed she was rebelling against America and the Vietnam War, she was actually destroying it man who based his entire life on America and the dream it promised, providing the narrative with layers of order, manifested in the gloves, the makeover and superficiality, and the chaos underlying the bombing for his downfall, the cancer within him kills him however, which perhaps offers the conclusion that we can offload problems onto close-knit family members, but in reality we are the problem. And so this extends to American identity as a whole. as he is his greatest enemy. Addressing the theme 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 attacked countriesfrom America, offering a cyclical structure. Roth then suggests that families feign trust when, underneath, they attack each other and vent their problems. A View From the Bridge addresses the issue of dumping in a similar way by placing the taboos of improper love, homophobia, and xenophobia as the causes of Eddie's death, when in reality the problem is his own ideology. When Eddie dies, the most obvious reason seems to lie in Marco and Rodolpho's complaint to the Immigration Office and in the tensions caused by Rodolpho's relationship with Catherine. At the beginning of the show, Eddie is portrayed as an overprotective uncle as he tells his niece "don't irritate me, Katie, you're walking wavy!" and when she begins her engagement to Rodolpho, Eddie declares that she "gives me the creeps." Particularly when Eddie “kisses [Catherine] on the mouth,” a psychoanalytic reading might refer to an inverted Oedipus complex, in which the father desires to possess his daughter. Once again, when Eddie explains that Rodolpho "sings, cooks, knows how to make clothes..." 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 for both his improper love for Catherine and homophobia. However, just as Roth showed that the Swede's downfall was not due to the Vietnam War or even terrorism, but to the internal destruction of the family, Miller shows that Eddie's death is due to his obsession with masculinity and control about the family. In a BBC interview in 1987, Miller said that Eddie "may believe that Rodolpho is gay, but he's forced to, he has to, so he can distance himself from his problems" which in fact rates both books perfectly: the characters take their problems out on the family members closest to them to protect themselves. In fact, Miller wrote many of his plays in the 1950s, during a time when communism was supposedly widespread in America and Senator Joseph McCathy's attempts to counter it were rampant. McCarthy published a blacklist of all communist sympathizers in America, conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and to collect that list he published investigations and interrogations, one of which was that of Arthur Miller himself; Miller however challenged the court to appoint anyone. And so, just as his play The Crucible can be read in this context as the Salem witch trials correspond to the trials of the 1950s, A View From the Bridge can be read similarly. Eddie betrays his family by reporting Marco, Rodolpho and the other cousins ​​to the police, which angers Marco, leading to Eddie's murder. So, in fact, by describing Eddie as a man who acts antithetically to Miller himself, betraying his family, Miller emphasizes that when we rebel 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 by denouncing his cousins ​​but killed himself; Alfieri found his death “useless”. And so Miller and Roth reinforce the idea that the biggest problem in our lives is not terrorism, or homosexuality, or immigration, but our own prejudices and ideologies, brought forward by ourselves. Both novels then question the realism of achieving the American dream: leading a perfect family. In American Pastoral, Roth opens by describing the Swede as the perfect American man: "the name was magical, as was the anomalous face...no one possessed anything remotely like the callous, jaw-jawed 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, he walked a little and stopped... and so he went for hours" suggests a simple, relaxed life, owning land and livestock, which was the pinnacle of the American Dream. This is evaluated in the anaphoric list “I am to marry a beautiful girl named Dwyer. I have to run a business built by my father... I have to live in the most beautiful place in the world”; for the Swede, up until the moment Merry committed terrorist acts, “he had made it”. However, Roth also comments on the realism of achieving this status, implying that beyond the lure of the 1960s, the American dream was just a facade. Across 1960s America, President Lyndon B. Johnson, after Kennedy's failures, promised to initiate reforms to give "a hand up, not a handout": 'Medicare' for the elderly, 'Head Start' for children, 'Job Corps' for the unemployed. However, beyond the seemingly dreamlike society, the Tet Offensive in North Vietnam suggested that America would lose the Vietnam War and major riots tore America apart. And so, with the novel set in this period, 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 is distancing herself from the Swede because she is in a relationship with Orcutt and therefore is in fact 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 grown up now. live and work in New York,” information that is particularly reminiscent of the Swede at the beginning of the novel: “He had brought photographs of his three boys… which boy was better at lacrosse… who was as good at football as he was at football. " The reader here sees a dramatic shift from the laid-back, family-oriented man to being, at the end of the novel, "a prisoner confined in a futureless box where he didn't have to think...not think...not think"; the repetition and diction emphasize the limitation of the Swede's life after he trusts Dawn and settles down the trust motif circulates immensely in Roth's novel, and is particularly apt during the Watergate crisis of the 1970s. President Nixon ordered the raid on the Democratic National Committee tapping the phone of the party president, Lawrence O'Brien, triggering a constitutional crisis due to the lack of confidence in the president of the United States. Then, as the characters sit around the dinner table "in the summer of the Watergate hearings," Roth suggests that trusting is a vulnerable and ultimately fatal action. The Swede begins his life by setting out for the American dream with Merry and Dawn, only for his daughter to turn to terrorism and his whereabouts are hidden by the woman he was having an affair with. with, and that his wife commits adultery in their kitchen with her plastic surgeon, and that they build a house while Dawn is planning to divorce the Swede. Roth then assesses that this dream is flawed; the perfect family life will collapse when those we trust turn against us. Similarly, in A View from the Bridge, Miller indicates that the perfect American family is equally difficult to achieve. It begins by characterizing Eddie as the stereotypically dominant male with Beatrice a passive wife. Alfieri says Eddie “was as good a man as he had to be in a hard, regular life. He worked on the docks… he brought his play home, and he lived” and this simple repetition of basic verbs.