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Introduction
Arthur Miller wrote several plays prior to "All My Sons", but only one of them, "The Man Who Had All the Luck", was produced in New York. Unfortunately, it closed after four performances. Years later, Miller was able to see how those previous attempts prepared him to write his breakthrough play.
Winner of the New York Drama Critic's Circle Award for best play of 1947, "All My Sons" is the work that launched Arthur Miller's long and distinguished career in the theatre. While few would argue that it is Miller's best or most important play, no one would dispute the fact that "All My Sons" deserves a special place in the playwright's canon because it constitutes his first major theatrical achievement, displays his extraordinary skill in handling dramatic form, and presages even better things yet to come from one of America's greatest dramatists.
Analyses
Ultimately, "All My Sons" is a play about both paradox and denial - or to state it more precisely, it is about a theme that Miller has described as "the paradox of denial."
The crimes against society committed by Joe Keller derive from the same instinct for self-preservation and self-assertion that foster the adoption of a counterfeit innocence and the illusion of one's being a victim at the hands of others. Keller prefers to see himself as a victim of others. Instead of acknowledging his complicity in the crime that sends unsuspecting pilots to their deaths, he lies about his involvement and denies his personal culpability so that he can preserve his false image of himself and maintain the illusion that he has regained his rightful place in society. Keller denies his connection to the disaster because he blinds himself to the impulses that make him a danger to himself as well as to others.
Paradoxically, the very denial that is designed to protect him from prosecution and incarceration sets in motion the chain of events that leads to Keller's own self-imprisonment and self-imposed execution. Therefore, the paradox of denial in "All My Sons" is that not only does denial dehumanize, by nullifying the value of he social contract through the justification of indefensible anti-social acts, but it also intensifies the personal anguish and the irremediable alienation that plunge an individual into despair and bring about his tragic suicide.
Keller's crime is magnified in his son's eyes because he has all too successfully manufactured the illusion that he is the infallible father figure. By attempting to fulfil the inhuman demands of perfection that this mythic, almost godlike, presence demands, Keller unwittingly sets himself up for a fall. Like Miller's most popular father, Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman", Keller never realises that his effort to protect and confirm in his family's eyes his self-chosen image has contributed his downfall.
In "All My Sons", Miller shows how the impulse to betray and to deny responsibility for others, when left ungoverned, can run rampant and wreak havoc on the individual, his family, and his society - even, perhaps, civilisation as a whole. The paradox of denial, therefore, is that the very defence mechanism that is employed to justify the rightness of a socially reprehensible act can ultimately become the exclusive means by which an individual self-destructs. The Kellers, and many of those around them, choose to blame everyone else for their dilemma, but only they are the authors of their destiny - and their failure to accept the tremendous burden of their freedom and responsibility is itself the cause of their personal tragedy.
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