All My Sons

Introduction of Arthur Miller

         Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was a  prolific American playwright, essayist, and prominent figure in  twentieth-century American theatre. Among his most popular plays  are All My Sons (1947),Death of a Salesman (1949), The  Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge(1955, revised 1956). He  also wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work  on The Misfits (1961). The drama Death of a Salesman is often  numbered on the short list of finest American plays in the 20th century  alongside Long Day's Journey into Night and A Streetcar Named  Desire.^[1]

      Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s,  1950s and early 1960s. During this time, he was awarded the Pulitzer  Prize for Drama; testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee; and was married to Marilyn Monroe. He received  the Prince of Asturias Award and the Praemium Imperiale prize in 2002  and the Jerusalem Prize in 2003,^[2] as well as the Dorothy and Lillian  Gish Lifetime Achievement Award and the Pulitzer Prize      


             The major of the play is the conflict between self-interest and the wider responsibility that people owe to the society in which they live. This conflict is mostly enacted through the characters of Joe, Chris, and the now-dead Larry.

        Joe has put all his energies into making money and building  up his business. He was determined to keep his factory  production line running, even when it caused the deaths of  twenty-one pilots through faulty airplane parts. At the end of  Act Two, when Chris realizes that Joe is responsible for the  pilots’ deaths, Joe says he did it for the business: “What could I  do! I’m in business, a man is in business; a hundred and twenty  cracked, you’re out of business …”

    In Joe’s mind, this is not selfish, as he did everything for Chris: “Chris, I did it for you, it was a chance and I took it for you.” Horrified, Chris demands, “Is that as far as your mind can see, the business? … What the hell do you mean, you did it for me?” In Chris’s view, people have a wider responsibility to mankind in general, and to society:

 “Don’t you have a country?

   Don’t you live in the world?”

     Joe has long convinced himself that Larry was his practical son, with a head for business, and that Chris was the impractical idealist. But he turns out to be wrong. It transpires that Larry found out about Joe’s conviction for causing the deaths of the pilots and could not live with the knowledge, and so committed suicide. Chris, on the other hand, reveals in Act Three that he suspected all along that Joe was guilty of the crime, but adopted a “practical” attitude and did not confront him.

       There is an implicit contrast between the self-sacrifice of the  men who died in the war, some of them as a result of Joe’s  factory’s faulty parts, and those who were looking after their  own interest, such as Joe. By association with Joe, Chris also  becomes stained with corruption, as he took a salary from his  father’s firm in spite of his suspicions that the money was  tainted with the blood of the dead airmen.

    Finally, in Act Three, Joe has to confront the implications of his actions. In words that foreshadow his end, he says of Chris, “I’m his father and he’s my son, and if there’s something bigger than that I’ll put a bullet in my head!” As the play shows, there is something bigger than that. So when Joe finally does face up to his crime, he does the only thing he can morally do, which is to extinguish his life. The sense of waste is overwhelming: not just of Joe’s life, but of all the other lives that have been lost or torn apart because of the pursuit of profit: the twenty-one airmen, Steve and the rest of the Deever family, Larry, Chris, and Kate.

What is more, Joe’s death is far from a resolution. Psychologists say that there is often an element of revenge in a suicide, with the suicide placing his or her body for maximum dramatic effect on the person who is deemed culpable. In All My Sons, Joe’s suicide carries a flavor of revenge on those who have pushed him to face his crime: Kate, Chris, and Ann. Accordingly, the curtain falls on Chris weeping with guilt over his father’s death, and there is a sense that his guilt will hang like a shadow over the marriage between him and Ann, if indeed it still takes place.

Thus the ramifications of Joe’s crime do not end with his death, but go on indefinitely.