Arthur Miller expresses his anger and shame about post-World War II American values through his work All My Sons, written in 1947. Miller conveys his views on this through the character Chris Keller. In All My Sons, before the show begins, Joe Keller, Chris' father, goes to prison after selling broken airplane parts to the Air Force, causing twenty-one planes to crash. Keller was sent to prison but soon released. He continued to operate in the same line that caused the death of the twenty-one young men. Keller's other son, Larry, was a pilot during the war, but disappeared around the same time as the plane crash and presumably died in the crash. At the beginning of the play, three years after all this happened, Chris returns home and finds that his father still values only success in his business and making money, and still believes that you are responsible only for your family and not for the your universe. In this play, Arthur Miller speaks through the character Chris Keller to convey that the values of Joe Keller, and many other people of this era, make him ashamed of his society. Throughout the play, Chris explains how it makes him angry to see his society. father who does business without even thinking about the men he is endangering and killing. Miller uses Chris to express his shame towards people like Joe Keller in his own society. In the first act, Chris gets into a heated argument with his father about how it feels to return home. He explains that he feels guilty for being alive and continuing to live because he knows he wouldn't be alive without the men who died in the war. When he returns home, he realizes that no one else feels guilty about the war or grateful for the soldiers who made enormous sacrifices, especially his father. ...... middle of the paper ...... because they just appreciate the importance of taking care of their family. Arthur Miller's views on American values and life after the events of World War II are clearly conveyed through the character of Chris Keller in the play All My Sons. By looking at Chris's opinions and actions throughout the play, it can be deduced that Miller was ashamed of his society because even after the war people still valued success in business, materialistic things like money and ideas. that one is responsible only for their family. Miller believed that war should affect and change people's values and believed that as an individual in society it was everyone's duty to feel grateful for the young people who sacrificed so much for their society, to recognize and want to see the beauty in the world. world and feel responsible to take care of the universe.
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