All My Sons

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1947

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Summary

Background

Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I

Act II

Act III

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Greed and Self-Interest

Joe Keller made his money building military aircraft engines during World War II, enriching himself at the cost of other people’s lives. He values his family’s wealth above all else, willingly sending his friend to prison and other men to their deaths to preserve his business. His idealistic son Chris believes in the American Dream and undergoes a crisis of faith when he begins to realize that the ideals he has sacrificed and fought for might be illusory, but his father has always had a more self-interested and practical view of life during war time. According to Joe, the entire country was profiting from the war. Since everyone was so greedy, he insists, he cannot be held accountable for the profits he made by fueling the military-industrial complex.

Joe repeats to himself and others that his greed was not motivated entirely by self-interest. He insists that he did what he did to help his family, positioning his war profiteering as the altruistic behavior of a family man. When he claims, early in Act III, that if there were anything more important than family, he would “put a bullet in [his] head,” he is inadvertently giving the game away: Family is the only plausible justification for his amoral behavior, without which he would be forced to recognize himself for the murderer he is. Joe may sincerely believe that he sought to help his family, but he did so at the expense of other families. He saved himself from prosecution by breaking apart Steve’s family, choosing his own family, his own reputation, his own legacy, and his own money above everything else. When he learns of Larry’s suicide note, he loses his sole justification: Far from helping his family, his actions led to his son’s death.

As much as Joe might lie about many things, he is not wrong about the kernel of greed at the center of his society. Many people were profiting from the war, not just Joe. Greed and self-interest are social problems, which is a terrible truth Chris must reckon with as part of the play. Chris can believe in individual wrongdoing. He can accept that some people—and perhaps even his father—would put their own self-interest over the interests of their country. What he cannot tolerate, however, is the idea that he fought and watched men die in the name of a society built on greed and self-interest. Joe lies about his past, but he tells the truth when he defends his actions as common practice during the war. Joe is not unique. Rather, he is emblematic of an entire society predicated on greed and self-interest over everything else. Chris’s anger with his father is indicative of his broader delusion, of the way in which his father represents the hollowed-out reality of the American Dream. The memories of the dead that still haunt Chris mean nothing, now that he has learned about the true nature of the nation he fought so hard to defend. Greed and self-interest corrupt Chris’s patriotism.

Greed and self-interest are not only related to a person’s material conditions. Joe’s self-interest involved profiting from war, but his wife also acts in a self-interested manner. Since she cannot face the traumatic reality of her son’s death, she demands that everyone indulge her delusion. She launches scathing attacks on anyone who threatens her delusion, greedily demanding that the world change to accommodate her interests. She threatens Kate and George because they contravene her view of her son’s disappearance, while indulging Frank because his horoscopes offer her false hope that her son might be alive. Kate’s delusions are fueled by self-interest, while her greed demands that others reject the truth about Larry’s disappearance despite all the evidence of what happened. The ending of the play dismantles the self-interest of Joe and Kate both, forcing them to confront the reality they’ve been hiding from.

Idealism and Cynicism

A key conflict in All My Sons is between cynicism and idealism. In a cynical, self-interested society, idealistic characters like Chris are forced to confront the hollowness of their beliefs. At the beginning of the play, Chris is the most idealistic character. He is a genuine believer in the American Dream, desperate to build something of worth and meaning in a country that he believes will reward his hard work and determination. Rather than simply inherit his father’s business, he has ambitions of moving away and starting afresh. At first, his desire to leave is not due to any personal reason. Instead, he is sincerely idealistic about his and his country’s prospects. After fighting in World War II, he has returned home in tragic circumstances, but Larry’s disappearance has not shaken Chris’s resolute belief that America is a truly wonderful, honest, moral place. This idealism can seem naïve. As the play progresses, Chris’s belief in the American justice system is just one of the ways in which his idealism is steadily dismantled. As Chris explains to George and Ann, he sincerely believes that his father is innocent because he has a paper from the court that exonerates him. The idea that the justice system might be flawed or that his father might be a liar is simply inconceivable for Chris. He fought a war for his country and he lost a family member in that war. He desperately needs to believe that this war was fought with a genuinely idealistic purpose on behalf of a genuinely idealistic nation. Chris is proven incorrect, and his idealism falls apart over the course of the play.

While Chris might be idealistic, those around him are not. Joe is a criminal who has escaped punishment by sacrificing his best friend. Kate deludes herself to avoid facing her husband’s guilt. The neighbors, in varying ways, have also internalized society’s cynicism. Sue criticizes Chris for being too idealistic, for example. In her discussion with Ann, she cannot comprehend the idea that Chris might be a sincerely idealistic person. Such naivety, she believes, must be an elaborate façade, designed to trick innocent people into sympathizing with him. To Sue, idealism is just cynicism in disguise. Her discussions of her husband’s career demonstrate her cynicism even more. Jim makes good money as a doctor but dreams of being a researcher. The change in profession would mean a loss of income and a reduction in their standard of living, something Sue cannot tolerate. She believes that Chris’s presence in the neighborhood fills Jim with an unhelpful degree of idealism that may prompt him to follow his dreams rather than preserve with the well-paid job he dislikes. Sue actively accuses Chris of spreading idealism as though it were an infectious disease. As the voice of undisguised cynicism in the play, she also claims that everyone in the neighborhood knows of Joe’s guilt, implying that they choose to look the other way because they are no different. In a society driven by greed, in which claims of idealism are merely a means to an end, the neighbors recognize Joe as one of their own. His cynicism is their cynicism.

Joe’s final act is an acceptance of a certain form of idealism. Throughout the play, Joe has insisted that he has acted on behalf of his family. Every mistake he made, every crime that he committed was for the benefit of the Kellers, he says. When he is no longer able to maintain the pretense that he is not responsible for his son’s death, however, he finds himself in an impossible position. Joe has cynically used the threat of suicide to bolster his delusional claims of innocence. When he realizes that Larry blamed his father for his suicide, however, Joe takes his own life. For the first time in the play, he stays true to his word. Rather than search for a new excuse or lie, he accepts his position. He follows through on his claim as this is the only way in which he can convince anyone of his integrity. Joe’s suicide is a tragic example of cynicism and idealism at the same time.

Loyalty and Betrayal

For the characters of All My Sons, loyalty is a guiding light that informs and justifies their decisions. They all claim to have loyalty to some person or cause, but these respective loyalties rarely line up with reality. The most prominent example is Joe, who explicitly conditions his actions on the loyalty he feels toward his family. Everything he did, he claims, was to secure the future for his wife and children. He built the business to secure a future for them, and he excuses his betrayal of his business partner and friend by citing his loyalty to his family above all. When questioned by Chris or anyone else, Joe turns this claimed loyalty into a shield. He believes that, by citing his responsibility to his family, he can excuse everything he did. The irony of this claim is that the corrupt actions Joe undertook, purportedly for the sake of his family, tore Steve’s family apart. Not only was Steve sent to prison, but his children refused to talk to him for years. Furthermore, the engines that were shipped under Joe’s orders led to the deaths of 21 American pilots. Those families were devastated so that Joe could profit from the war. Only when Joe is given explicit evidence that his actions led to Larry’s suicide does he cease to use loyalty toward his family as a justification for his actions. He has nothing left to say in his own defense. His claims of loyalty lasted only as long as he could maintain his hypocritical façade.

Chris feels loyalty to a seemingly higher cause. As an idealist, Chris believes in the American Dream. He went to war to fight for the idealistic beliefs he attributed to his nation and which he felt a responsibility to defend. At the beginning of the play, Chris is still beholden to this sense of loyalty, both to the American ideal and to the soldiers who died defending it. He wants to build something for himself because, as an American and a soldier, he feels that he is responsible for giving meaning to the deaths of the men he fought alongside. Chris watched many men die during World War II, and their memories weigh heavily on him. By making something of his life, he gives meaning to their deaths. As he discovers the cynicism at the heart of the American society, as embodied by his father and his crimes, his sense of loyalty ebbs away. Chris comes to loathe the idea that he fought for a society that has none of his idealistic beliefs and, by the end of the play, he has abandoned any sense of responsibility to fight for what he once held to be true. His loyalty, like his naïve optimism, is completely decimated.

Kate is one of many characters who feel a sense of loyalty to Larry’s memory. She refuses to accept that he might be dead because she feels that such an admission would be tantamount to a betrayal. As long as the slimmest of possibilities remains that he might be alive, Kate believes that she must cling to this possibility. She praises Ann, too, for remaining loyal to the memory of her missing boyfriend, and when Ann expresses her wish to move on, Kate’s admiration swiftly turns to condemnation for this perceived betrayal. In other ways, Larry’s other family members feel similarly beholden to his memory. When Chris tells his father that he plans to marry Ann (Larry’s former girlfriend), for example, Joe’s first response is to refer to Larry. Even though both accept that Larry is almost certainly dead, they condition their behavior in the present on how these actions might relate to Larry’s memory. They are similarly reluctant to challenge Kate’s delusion, perhaps because the ferocity with which she clings to their memory makes them feel somewhat ashamed that they are so prepared to accept Larry as dead, even though this is evident beyond doubt. When Chris reads out his brother’s letter to Ann, he challenges the family’s responsibility to the missing member. Larry says that he will end his life because of his father’s actions. He takes responsibility where Joe will not and, by extension, forces Joe to finally take responsibility for his actions.