All My Sons by Arthur Miller

Arthur Mille¬r expresses his anger and shame of post World War II American values through his play All My Sons, written in 1947. Miller conveys his views about this through the character Chris Keller. In All My Sons, before the play begins, Joe Keller, Chris’s father, went to jail after selling cracked airplane parts to the air force, causing twenty-one planes to crash. Keller was sent to jail but soon released. He continued to work in the same line that caused the death of the twenty-one young men. Keller’s other son, Larry, was a pilot in the war, but went missing around the same time of the plane crashes and presumably died in the crash. At the beginning of the play, three years after all of this happened, Chris arrives back home and discovers that his father still only values succeeding in his business and making money, and still believes you are only responsible for your family and not your universe. In this play, Arthur Miller speaks through the character Chris Keller to communicate that the values of Joe Keller, and many other people of this era, make him feel ashamed of his society.

Throughout the play, Chris explains how it angers him to see his father doing business without even thinking about the men he is putting in danger and killing. Miller uses Chris to express his shame of people like Joe Keller in his own society. In Act I, Chris gets into a heated argument with his father about what it feels like to be back home. He explains that he feels guilty to be alive and continue living because he knows that he would not be alive without the men that died in war. When he arrives back home, he realizes that nobody else feels guilty about the war or grateful for the soldiers who made huge sacrifices, especially his father. ...

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...cause they only value the importance of taking care of their family.

Arthur Miller’s views about the American values and life after the events of World War II are clearly conveyed through the character of Chris Keller in the play All My Sons. From looking at Chris’s opinions and actions throughout the play, you can infer that Miller felt ashamed of his own society because even after the war people still continued to valued succeeding in business, materialistic things such as money, and the idea that one is only responsible for their family. Miller believed that the war should have affected and changed peoples’ values and believed that as a individual of the society it is everyone’s duty to feel grateful for the young men who have sacrificed so much for their society, recognize and want to see beauty in the world, and feel responsible for taking care of the universe.