All My Sons – Arthur Miller Bryan Diaz, period 6
Choice 2: “All My Sons” is a pretty climatic, well written literary work, composed by author Arthur Miller. As the story goes, a family of four (mainly three) is concerned about one of the sons, Larry, who has been missing for quite a while as he was sent to go out for World War II. Basically, the story leads up to an eventful ending, which involves the suicide of the father of the Keller family, Joe Keller. Joe Keller is a businessman who owns a factory that ships machine parts (like for planes), and in the plot of the story, one of his workers, the father of Larry’s ex fiancée (who now loves the other son of Joe, Chris) works with defective machine parts that happen to eventually be used and kill 21 pilots that flew during the war. As the plot approaches the end, we see that Joe is getting more frustrated, and it seems to be clearer that he should be jailed for his involvement in the crime, considering that one of those pilots was Larry, HIS OWN SON. As Chris never really gets the balls to tell his dad to go to jail until the end, Joe gets more and more frustrated with his family putting guilt on him; Eventually, Chris realizes that his father truly is guilty for shipping out those parts, and tries to set him straight, with his soon to be wife (Larry’s ex). Joe finally gets the message after seeing a letter Larry had left to his ex-fiancée, and he goes inside to “gather his things”. He shoots himself. In my opinion, the ending of this drama was actually VERY appropriate. In most stories nowadays, especially dramas, there is always some sort of twist. In this case, the twist surely wasn’t THAT out of nowhere, some readers that think outside the box may have predicted that it was inevitable for Joe to commit suicide. Before I finished the story, I predicted that Joe would end up going to jail. However, that was also that second thought near the back of my mind that another possibility would be that he would kill himself, and that became my primary prediction as it became clearer to me near the end, especially when Joe reads the suicide letter of his son Larry (which, by the way, Larry killed himself because of his father’s guilt). It’s not that I’m a sick person or anything, but this here is a drama, a certain genre that’s supposed to appeal to the emotions and provide a library of twists more than most other stories or novels out there. What I enjoy about this ending is that it does have that key drama element… Not only the minor plot twist (as I like to say, some might say it’s a pretty wild plot twist), but also the fact that this ending can be compared to standing on a boat, a good distance from a