One bit of the first act that I did not quite understand initially was the whole deal with Bert, jail and Joe’s gun. If everything an author writes serves a particular purpose, what was the meaning of this childish role play? Clearly it was not just to amuse the kid, and I don’t think Bert was too amused when he was literally kicked out of the yard by a raging Kate later on. In retrospect, this might have simply been foreshadowing the fact that Joe owns a gun, which he will later use to kill himself.
This act ends in an ominous note with Kate’s repeated warnings for Joe to “be smart”. At this point I could not help but wonder: what is it that Joe has to look out for? Act one only briefly touches on the subject of Joe’s potential fault, but we have yet to know who exactly should be held responsible. However, Joe’s evasive attitude towards the subject couldn’t help but make me speculate that he might have had a hand in it. I’m sure the next Act will clear up this mystery.
Act Two
One of the more interesting characters in my opinion made quite an impression on me in this act. Joe and Kate’s neighbor Sue declared in her rage that she “resented living next door to the Holy Family. It makes me look like a bum!” In the earlier act she had merely occurred to me as one who was insecure, practical, and jealous. Insecure she was regarding her own body size, practical she was regarding money, and jealous she was of her neighbours, who seemed to have it all.
Upon reading Act Two, I began to sympathize even more for the parents. This sympathy was strongest when Kate told her son that “we’re dumb, Chris. Dad and I are stupid people. We don’t know anything. You’ve got to protect us”. Her vulnerability and yearning for care started making me see Chris in a new light, in which he is the selfish son that will sacrifice the well-being of his parents for his own gain. To my surprise, I started feeling fractions of the same sympathy for Joe, even though I had been suppressing this feeling due to the notion that he had sacrificed the lives of twenty-one pilots, as well as his partner, for his own gain. In his fury, Joe had declared that “a father is a father!” A proclamation that I had heard numerous times during my time spent with my own father. This line, at first sight, might merely seem to be that of indignity, but upon close examination, and in relation to my own personal experience, Joe was merely trying to seize the sense of authority that he felt he was losing with the maturing of his son.
In the final pages of the act, I finally see Chris taking a stand against his father, confronting him at last for his crime. The purgation of Chris’s emotions especially struck me, never in this play had I seen him display that much passion and rage. To this, Joe still held on fast to the idea that he “did it for you” and that risking the lives of twenty-one pilots “was a chance and I took it for you”.
Act Three
In the final act of the play, I am shown the wisdom of Jim, Sue’s husband. To me he seems like the wisest of everyone in the play. In the earlier acts he was shown passing on marriage advice to Ann, advising her that “when you marry, never— even in your mind— never count your husband’s money”. He also tells Kate that “as soon as a woman supports a man e owes her something. You can never owe somebody without resenting them”. These two pieces of advice, upon careful contemplation, really do seem to be coherent to most marriages. In this act he is not passing on more marriage experience, but shown comforting a distressed Kate, and using his wisdom, he tells her that “we all come back. These private revolutions always die. The compromise is always made”, assuring her that Chris will eventually come back to them.
In my opinion, to “come back” is to accept responsibility, and to not live in your own little niche and be so self-centered. There comes a time when you have to realize that there are other people in the world, and that in some subtle way, you are related to them. This Jim tells Kate, when referencing his own experience in New Orleans.
Fortunately, eventually Chris did come back. However, both Kate and Joe had underestimated Chris’s anger, they were quite certain that Joe’s own son would not turn Joe in. In defense Joe remarked that “there’s nothin’ he could do that I wouldn’t forgive. Because he’s my son. Because I’m his father and he’s my son”. His theory of mutual forgiving is purely hypothetical, and Chris is quick to remark that his father should realize “once and for all there’s a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to it, and unless you know that you threw away your son because that’s why he died”.
The hurt Joe must have felt at this point was so great, that I as the reader was not surprised at all at his choice to take his own life. To him, it would have been the most elegant way to retreat from a lost battle.
Epilogue
Most recently, the play All My Sons was brought back to Broadway, and notably starred Katie Holmes as Ann Deever. Myself I do not consider that much of a stargazer, so in attempting to pinpoint the significance of the play being reprised, it only faintly occurred to me that it might just be yet another Hollywood star’s stab at stage theatre. In my personal opinion, the revival of the play symbolizes it has at least some degree of relevance to current events, namely the Iraq war. Have times really changed? Over sixty years after the end of World War II, military contractors are still profiting greatly from the prolonged Iraq war. While soldiers are in the battlefields sacrificing their lives for the sake of their country, military companies are earning tens of billions of dollars!
This play struck me deeper than Oedipus the King and King Lear ever had. All My Sons brought me to realize that although I might just be a single nucleus in this whole world of matter, I do have some sort of influence on the people surrounding me. For this minimal purpose, everyone should take on some degree of social responsibility. I also saw reflections of the relationship between my father and me and that of Joe and Chris. For the longest time I had had a strained relationship with my father. Ignorance to his hardships on my side and lack of tolerance on his side led to more than one case of explosions. I sincerely hope that this play will in some way give me more insight on the way I should treat my father. Hopefully, we can gain a term of mutual respect and understanding, and not result in a catastrophe like Joe and Chris had.
