All My Sons by Arthur Miller

All My Sons by Arthur Miller During the course of this essay I will be investigating a play called

'All My Sons' by Arthur Miller. The play was written during the war

and was set in the suburbs of a town 700 miles from New York. Arthur

thought that if the play was even published if would be published

during the war but his expectations weren't to be as it was published

when the war was over. An atomic bomb had ended the war, this bomb was

followed by a shock of waves and heavy winds and the radiation lasted

several years and killed 100,000 more people.

As it turned out the play was produced during a period of peace.

'Memories are especially short and by the time the played opened in

1947 it was already difficult for people to believe that people would

knowingly ship out lethal ammunitions to the armed forces'

So understandably quite a few adjustments had to be made.

The play is in relation to a man called Joe Keller who knowingly

shipped out a hundred and twenty faulty cylinder heads for P40 planes,

that killed 21 pilots, he was in the penitentiary for a while but was

released as he denied a phone call to his colleague Steve Deever about

coming into work that morning, and as the jury couldn't prove a phone

call he was then later released but Steve was put to jail and remains

there throughout the play.

Joe had a son called Larry who was at war when he heard about what his

father had done and unfortunately couldn't live with...

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...unity.

But underneath the faultless society lies the heartbreak and hardship

from the war. The families are forced to deal with the tension and

unpleasant truths that emerge years after the conflict broke out.

This play shows just how close the boys were in the war and how close

their friendships were; they literally died for each other.

And what Joe never realised was that the pilots he was shipping the

cylinder heads out to were like his sons; and unfortunately he was

their worst enemy.

I will end this piece of coursework with a quote from Arthur Miller

himself;

''i think the essence of the tale remains what it always was, that

there is a society out there and one has certain responsibility toward

it if only on a purely human level, if one may speak in those terms.'

Arthur Miller, January 13th, 2003