Summary:
Life is full of many hard decisions that people have to take, often on the spur of the moment. Some we get right others turn horribly wrong. Joe Keller, the tragic hero of Arthur Miller's play All My Sons, was no different. His whole life was dedicated to his family and their well being but all his plans were undone by one fatally flawed decision.
Life is full of many hard decisions that people have to take, often on the spur of the moment. Some we get right others turn horribly wrong. Joe Keller, the tragic hero of Arthur Miller's play All My Sons, was no different. His whole life was dedicated to his family and their well being but all his plans were undone by one fatally flawed decision.
The audience can relate to Joe and feel sympathy for him because he was a good man who did many great things for his family and in the end paid the ultimate price. Towards the end of the play, Joe's son Chris anguishes over the fatally flawed decision made by his father, thus eliciting the sympathy of the audience. However, this is not enough to detract from the audience relating to Joe as a basically good man, who has made the hard decisions for many years and ends up a tragic hero paying for his mistake with his life.
Joe is a good man who has spent his whole life trying to live the American Dream. He has built a home and started up a business to take care of his family. He is a hardworking and considerate father to his sons, Chris and Larry and a caring and loving husband to his wife Kate. The audience knows this because early in the play, of Act 1, he says to Chris, "Because what the hell did I work for? That's only for you Chris, the whole shootin' match for you!"(Act 1, p15-16). The audience believes this because throughout the play they see no evidence of Joe indulging in any of the human weaknesses, which would squander his money. He is an easy-going man who is a good friend to everyone. The play is set in his backyard, which seems to be a perpetual open house to the neighbourhood. He is well-liked by people in his small town, as Ann says, "People like to do things for the Kellers. Been that way since I can remember"(Act 1, p41). So well-liked is Joe that even though the town's folk know of Joe's mistake they too feel sympathy for him and have forgiven him.
Joe doesn't have many bad qualities in him the only times the audience do see such qualities is when he speaks ill of Steve to others like when he says, "I owe him a good kick in the teeth"(Act 2, p47). However, the audience knows he does not really mean these things but only says them to cover up his fatal mistake. So we forgive Joe his mistake because as Plutarch, the Delphic priest, said almost 2000 years ago, "to make no mistakes is not in the power of man " and also because Joe tries to rectify his mistake by offering to give Steve a good job when he gets out of prison and offering to help Steve's children.
Joe has spent his life making many decisions most of which appear to have been good decisions resulting in his family enjoying a comfortable life. The audience admires him for this. Unfortunately, late one night Joe made a hurried decision, which he believed he could get away with. The reasons for his decision comes to light near the end of the play, in Act 2, when he tells Chris why he made that decision, "I'm a business man, a man is in business; a hundred and twenty cracked, you're out of business, you got a process, the process don't work you're out of business; you don't know how to operate, your stuff is no good; they close you up, they tear up your contract what the hell's it to them? You lay forty years into a business and they knock you out in five minutes, what could I do, let them take forty years, let them take my life away""(Act 2, p67). The audience sympathise with Joe's decision knowing that 'there but for the grace of God go I '.
Joe's business was his life. His life was his family. In the end, his family was not just his wife and two sons but, as the title of the play suggests, Joe's family was also the twenty-one men who died, from the result of his fatally flawed mistake. They were all his sons. Joe finally understands this and his last words explain his comprehension to the audience in Act 3, when he says, "Sure he was my son. But I think to him they were all my sons. And I guess they were, I guess they were"(Act 3, p79).
Finally, the audience feels more sympathy for Joe because he is the typical tragic-hero. His whole life has been perfect until he makes one fatal mistake, which results in all his plans unravelling. In the end Joe is faced with more tragedy than most people could endure. He learns from his wife that many people in the small town know about his deception, even Jim, his good friend. He also realises that his wife has gone through so much pain and suffering over Larry's death that she had 'no strength to think anymore', and finally in the end his son Chris's turns against him and Joe is forced to realise that he may have caused his owns sons death as well as the deaths of all his sons.
The ever-practical Joe cannot understand why his decision has caused such a problem. He believed family was everything but his two sons Chris and Larry wanted something bigger than family, something that Joe could not comprehend, until the end of the play, of Act 3. "I'm his father and he's my son, and if there's something bigger than that I'll put a bullet through my head"(Act 3, p73). When Joe finally realised that there was something bigger, that he had in fact killed twenty-one of his sons, he was true to his word and ended his life with a bullet.
The audience feels some sympathy for Chris, because he has experienced a lot in his young life. He has been to war and seen men killed. He has to live in the shadow of his younger brother Larry who appears to be the favourite of both parents and he loves the girlfriend of his dead brother. Finally, he has to deal with the fact that it his father who has killed his brother Larry and twenty-one other young pilots. However, there are many in the audience who like Joe would think that Chris has had things too easy and is making much ado about nothing.
It is Joe Keller for whom the audience feels the greater sympathy and respect because he was a great man, who made a fatally flawed decision, which continued to haunt him through life. He finally understood the meaning of life within family and the society in which we all live in and that is that you cannot make flawed decisions which impact others and get away with it. When Joe realises this, he is brave enough to pay the price for his mistake, and that is what makes Joe a hero in the audience's eyes. As the US folklorist & expert on mythology, Joseph Campbell, said, "A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself ." There was nothing bigger for Joe than his family.
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