Miller seems to take a great interest in the subject of the father-son conflict. It could be said here that what Miller intended to set the father-son conflict as a central issue or theme. Concerning All My Sons, the following questions are crucial: why has Joe taken such an attitude as a father and what has his way of life meant to his sons, Larry and Chris?
Examining the confrontation between Joe and Chris in All My Sons, we notice two different notions contradicting each other at a deeper level. For one thing, Joe represents the old generation in his realistic and practical thinking as opposed to Chris who is quite romantic and full of idealism. For another, while Joe puts his family before anything else and sticks to securing the father image and fatherly dignity at home, Chris firmly believes that unity with the wider outside world beyond the family is an ideal way of living.
Furthermore, Joe represents those who remained in the country during World
War II, and Chris, on the other hand, takes a stance as a war veteran. Needless to say, at the bottom there lies a generation gap in the conflict. The conflict, however, forms a bit more complicated structure.
First of all, what kind of person is Joe Keller? He is a so-called “self-made man.” He is also a “rags-to-riches” type of man who has worked pretty hard and become a successful owner of a factory. The hardships he has gone through are not mentioned in detail in the play, but we can imagine them from what he says. He tells his wife, Kate, about Chris, “I should put him out when he was ten like I was put out, and make him earn his keep. Then he’d know how a buck is made in this world.” This clearly shows how he started his independent life away from home when he was very young. The following also tells us how he has established his present position through difficulties. “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?” In this scene he is explaining to Chris why he would not like to give up his factory, which he has kept forty long years despite the faulty cylinder heads the factory produced and shipped to the armed forces. Since, Joe, left home when he was so young, we could easily assume that he had to make his own living without proper education. When we come to understand how hard he worked to become a successful owner of the factory, we could consider him an independent, rugged, and self-made gentleman.
Joe got along rather well, even though influenced by the old values to some extent. He is a realist.
To Joe the family is everything. Especially his sons. Joe’s following words to
Kate concerning Larry show this: “I’m his father and he’s my son, and if there’s something bigger than that I’ll put a bullet in my head!” His head has been full of dreams that he will let his sons inherit his factory, which he has established for decades. Joe’s problem, therefore, is not in the fact he couldn’t distinguish between right and wrong as Miller himself explains, but in the fact since he trapped in the small world of his own family, he could not turn his eyes to the society at large, the world beyond the family.
In contrast to Joe, Chris is an idealist. Further, his war experience has constantly occupied his mind to an unnecessary extent. It is assumed that he had a comfortable upbringing, and stayed home until he left for the war. As the play suggests, the war experience affected him tremendously. Joe puts his family before anything else and is supposedly a model husband for his wife and a role model for his sons. Rising from poor conditions, he has become a successful owner of a big factory with his own efforts. He, therefore, could keep his authority as a father without revealing his faults. On the other hand, how about Chris who was raised by such a father? As he himself confesses, he has been an obedient son: “ I’ve been a good son too long, a good sucker” Generally speaking, a growing son goes from the process of respect or adoration toward his own father or somebody who has played a father’s role to that of slow separation from him and gaining social independence.
In short, Chris could not become independent of his father, largely because
Joe was a fond father to Chris, and Chris lost an opportunity to get independent and build up his own character. In addition, Kate’s influence upon Chris cannot be overlooked. Her existence as a fond mother contributes much to the fact that Chris could not become independent of his parents. Kate says to Chris: “Honest to God, it breaks my heart to see what happened to all the children. How we worked and planned for you, and you end up no better than us” Before this, Miller has described Kate as a mother with “an overwhelming capacity for love” We can easily imagine that Kate’s excessive love spoiled Chris to a great extent.
During his experience in the war Chris found out is solidarity and responsibility between two men. Those are noble ideas, which Chris learned in his war situations. When he tried applying them to actual society, however, problems occurred. To Chris who had this war experience, it is quite natural that he found actual society incredible.
It would be possible to say that the solidarity and responsibility which
Chris experienced in the battlefield at least urged him to be aware of his own ego, that is, independence from his parents and establishing his own identity. The feeling of solidarity and the sense of responsibility he learned in the war have their true meaning in the army where military cooperation and unity count as a whole.
Naturally Chris can never get along with Joe because of his unrealistic ideas.
“I was dying every day and you were killing my boys and you did it for me? What the hell do you think I was thinking of, the goddam business? Is that as far as your mind can see, the business? What is that, the world - the business? What the hell do you mean, you did it for me? Don’t you have a country? Don’t you live in this world? What the hell are you?”
Miller’s intention in the drama is not merely to describe the conflict between father and son. His real intention is to integrate the conflict between Joe and Chris is based on the basic pattern of the rebellion of a son against his father.
