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"All My Sons" by Arthur Miller



                                                 



                     
                       Arthur Miller is America's leading playwright. He was deeply influenced by the Greek drama, Ibsen and Odets. His works reflect the same quest for order in human relations as depicted in the Greek drama. His success as a playwright begins with one of his most widely known plays All My Sons (1947). Arthur Miller's plays depict the human tendency of betrayal and guilt which leads to the decay, and degeneration of human values. The intensity of these two elements of betrayal and guilt may vary in his plays, but it runs through all his plays as a motif. Joe, a selfish businessman, in order to save his business from ruin, supplies defective cylinder heads to the American Air Force which results in the death of 21 fighter plane pilots. The theme of betrayal and guilt pervades the action of the play from its very beginning. The person who has committed the crime tries to justify his betrayal and guilt on the grounds which are not acceptable to the just social system. The jail motif runs throughout the play. It testifies to the fact that jail is a place where wrongdoers have to go ultimately. Joe Keller betrays his business partner, Steve Deever, too. It is true that Miller exposes man's cruel nature in All My Sons, but it is also true that he condemns traits of treachery, betrayal and selfishness in man's nature. Miller seems to suggest that one must remain faithful and responsible to the interests of society, failing which one must bear the consequences as we notice in All My Sons. Towards the end of the play Joe Keller atones for his crime and sin by committing suicide.

                         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.

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