All My Sons

“The trouble with you is, you don’t believe in anything.”

Jim’s accusation highlights the gulf between his worldview and that of his neighbor, Frank. Frank’s credulous optimism is the antithesis of Jim’s cynical pessimism, but neither pose is adequate to the task of facing reality. Each is a form of escapism, with Jim escaping the disappointment of his unrealized dreams by pretending nothing matters while Frank escapes the bleakness of life by through magical thinking.

“Today a doctor could make a million dollars if he could figure out a way to bring a boy into the world without a trigger finger.”

Joe’s whole personality is so devoted to making money that even as he laments the devastation of war, he does so in business terms, imagining the money someone could make inventing a cure for war.

“You can talk yourself blue in the face, but there’s no body and there’s no grave, so where are you?”

Kate looks for any reason to believe what she wants to believe. So long as there is no incontrovertible evidence that her son is dead, she will continue to believe he is alive, interpreting random occurrences as cosmic signs. This willed ignorance of reality will be revealed as untenable by the end of the play.

“I ignore what I gotta ignore.”

Like his wife, Joe hides from reality, but unlike her, he is aware that he deludes himself. He simply cannot think too hard or too much about his own morality or his past actions, as this would force him to confront the idea that he might not be a good person. He depends on deliberate ignorance, putting aside anything that might challenge his identity.

“Everything decides to happen at the same time.”

Kate deliberately surrenders her agency, desperately invoking the existence of any form of higher power that might provide her with comfort in the context of Larry’s disappearance. If everything happens for a reason, she wants to believe, then Larry might still be able to return to her. She wants the intervention of fate, God, or astrology to offer her some comfort in the face of the bleak reality that her son is almost certainly dead.

“Because certain things have to be, and certain things can never be. Like the sun has to rise, it has to be. That’s why there’s God. Otherwise anything could happen. But there’s God, so certain things can never happen.”

Kate is explaining to Ann why she feels certain that Larry is alive. Her faith in God is self-protective, amounting to a delusional belief that the worst can’t happen to her.

“Except I wasn’t, and there was a court paper in my pocket to prove I wasn’t.”

Just as Kate relies on mystical signs to prove that Larry is alive, Joe relies on a court verdict he knows is erroneous to prove his innocence. The court’s authority serves as a useful way for Joe to propagate his self-delusion. He needs to believe in his innocence as much as he wants to prove it to other people.

“All right … that’s bad, it’s wrong, but that’s what a little man does. If I could have gone in that day I’d a told him—junk ‘em, Steve, we can afford it. But alone, he was afraid. But I know he meant no harm.”

Joe casts blame on Steve for his own actions, using Steve’s reputation for timidity to make the accusation plausible. He presents himself as the bigger man, the one who would have had the courage to do the right thing, if only he had been there. When he insists that Steve simply made a mistake, he is voicing what he needs to believe about himself. Joe needs Steve as a canvas on which to project his own desire for forgiveness and atonement.

“I felt…what you said…ashamed somehow. Because nobody was changed at all. It seemed to make suckers out of a lot of guys. I felt wrong to be alive, to open the bank-book, to see the new refrigerator.”

Chris describes what he felt at returning from the war and going to work for his father’s firm. He has been changed by his experience in the war, but businessmen like his father haven’t changed—they’ve just found a new source of revenue, making money from the war without any understanding of what it means to fight in it.

“Be smart now, Joe. The boy is coming. Be smart.”

George’s arrival is Joe’s undoing, and Kate’s ominous warning suggests that she is more aware of her husband’s guilt than she lets on. What she wants most is to survive: to continue clinging to the twin fictions that her son is alive and her husband is innocent. To keep those fictions alive through the evening, both she and Joe will have to think strategically.

“You notice there’s more light with that thing gone?”

The apple tree was planted in memory of Larry, and Kate has always hated it, since she does not believe that Larry is gone. After the tree has fallen, she remarks that more light is able to flood into the yard. To her, the return of the light symbolizes the imminent return of her son. Within the play, however, the light has a different symbolic significance: It suggests that the family cannot hide their secrets in darkness any longer, and must confront the truth.

“He’s driving my husband crazy with that phony idealism of his, and I’m at the end of my rope on it!”

Sue’s comment reflects an innate cynicism in American society of the era. She, like everyone else, recognizes that Chris is an idealistic young man. She cannot accept that this idealism is sincere, however, as she believes that all such beliefs must inherently be a façade, put on for other people. Through her doubts about Chris’s sincerity, Sue reveals a cynical disillusionment with American society, in which she cannot believe that anyone could genuinely be that idealistic, and that any such idealism is just cause for resentment.

“No, kid, it ain’t nice of me.”

Joe offers a job to both George and Steve. Though his offer appears to be magnanimous, there is a subtext to his words. The offer to George and Steve is not a gesture, but a bribe. Joe is attempting to use his financial resources to buy the forgiveness of the men he has wronged. His lies led to Steve’s imprisonment and caused the fracture in Steve’s family that drove George away. Through his false magnanimity, Joe is attempting to buy the silence and the forgiveness of those he has wronged.

“I liked it the way it was.”

George turns down the offer to see how Jim and Sue have changed the house where he grew up. There is no aesthetic motivation to his response. Instead, he is attempting to cling to his nostalgic view of the past. He prefers to keep his memories of the house intact, as they were when his family were all together and free from scandal. To George, the house represents a lost past that he does not want to disrupt.

“Don’t civilize me!”

George’s anger at attempts to “civilize” (126) him represent his learned distrust of social institutions. The same courts that supposedly represent civilization are those that wrongly convicted his father of a crime and tore apart George’s family. Now that he has learned the truth, he rejects the authority and morality that these supposedly civil institutions represent. He will not be imprisoned by them in the same way that they have imprisoned his father.

“That’s why he took up astrology. It’s all in when you were born, it just goes to show.”

Kate really wants to believe that astrology can explain why her neighbor Frank managed to continually stay ahead of the military draft throughout World War II. Because he avoided the draft, Frank was able to build a career in the United States while other men of a similar age were being traumatized in a war. He stayed ahead of the draft by a quirk of his birthday. Rather than some elaborate, supernatural astrological blessing, the good fortune was a simple matter of being born on the right day. Kate believes in astrology because it adds credence to her belief that Larry might one day come home. To preserve this belief, she is willing to lie to herself about the merits of any form of higher power, supernatural intervention, or good luck.

“I had to fire a mechanic to save his face.”

Joe’s defense of Steve contains an admission of his own attitudes toward right and wrong. He tells a story about Steve nearly burning down a factory and then claims that he fired an employee to preserve Steve’s reputation. The story may or may not be true, but Joe’s inability to discern the immorality of firing a man to cover up his friend’s mistakes is telling of his attitude toward the truth. Joe cannot comprehend how this story might reflect badly on him.

“He never flew a P-40.”

Joe repeats that Larry did not fly the type of planes that were brought down by the faulty engines. He clings to this truism so that he does not have to believe that he may be directly responsible for his son’s death. While Larry may not have been in a P-40, many other men were. These men were sons and brothers in their own right, a fact that Larry grasped to tragic effect. Joe did not kill Larry directly, but his attitude toward war profiteering and money became evidence of a world that Larry could tolerate no longer.

“You’re not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what are you?”

Chris’s accusation is suggestive of the dehumanizing effects of mid-century American capitalism. Joe has come to embody the idea of profits and self-interest above everything to such an extent that—in his son’s eyes—he is barely even recognizable. Chris cannot understand his father as a human or even an animal. He is some new and terrible thing that Chris cannot comprehend but that horrifies him completely.

“And now I live in the usual darkness; I can’t find myself; it’s even hard sometimes to remember the kind of man I wanted to be.”

Jim is brutally honest about his own personal connection to the world around him. To outsiders, he has a wonderful life. He is a doctor in the world’s foremost superpower, someone with a good wage, a good house, and a loving wife. Despite this, Jim feels alienated from the world. He would rather be a researcher, even though this more rewarding position would make him much poorer. He cannot pursue his true hopes or ambitions because he is caught in the same repetitive cycle of earning money to survive. In a society governed by money and self-interest, Jim knows that he can never be the kind of man he wanted to be.

“I don’t know. I’m beginning to think we don’t know him. They say in the war he was such a killer. Here he was always afraid of mice. I don’t know him.”

Kate attempts to distance herself from her son Chris after he confronts his father. By imagining that the war has transformed Chris into someone she doesn’t recognize, she can temporarily avoid having to reckon with the truth of his words.

“I have nowhere to go.”

At the beginning of the play, Ann is the only character who knows the truth about Larry’s death. Once she has shared this with Kate, once she has learned of Joe’s guilt and her father’s innocence, she is stuck. In a literal and figurative way, she has nowhere to go. She does not know what to do with her life, nor how her relationships with endure the truth. She stays and waits for Chris because she does not know what else she can do.

“This is the land of the great big dogs, you don’t love a man here, you eat him!”

Chris characterizes his father as a predatory animal. More disturbing for Chris, however, is his recognition that Joe is not unique within American society, but representative of it. The same greed and self-interest that led Joe to ship the broken engines to make a profit from the war is everywhere around Chris, disgusting him. Chris recognizes that he killed in the name of the “land of the great big dogs” (149) and he is disgusted with himself for being so naïve.