All My Sons

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1947

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Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I

Act II

Act III

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

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Act IIIChapter Summaries & Analyses

Act III Summary

In the early hours of the morning, Kate sits alone on the porch. She stares up at the moon. Next door, Jim returns home after visiting a patient and loudly declares that he always believed Joe to be guilty. Chris has gone away by himself, Kate reveals. Jim assures Kate that, unlike her other son, Chris will return. However, he claims that Chris lacks the “talent” (143) needed to live with the truth about his father’s actions. He describes a time when he abandoned his wife for two months until she begged him to come back. He returned and now lives in the “usual darkness” (143).

Joe walks onto the porch. Kate tells her husband that he should consider handing himself over to the authorities, since so many people seem to know the truth. This infuriates Joe, who resents Jim’s interfering presence. Joe defends himself again. Everything he did, he claims, was to make money for his family. Kate understands that the idealistic Chris will never agree with Joe, as he believes in his integrity over everything else, even family. Joe cannot grasp this. If there were anything more important than family, he says, he would “put a bullet in [his] head” (145). He compares Chris to Larry, claiming that Larry would never act in this irrational manner, as he understood the importance of money. He asks Kate what he should do, and she assures him that nothing will happen.

Ann enters and talks to Kate, hoping that she will be honest with Chris with regard to Larry. She needs Kate to confront her son’s death so that she will not stand in the way of Ann and Chris marrying. Kate dismisses Ann’s request, insisting that Ann leave alone in the morning. Claiming that she knows that Larry is dead, Ann asks Joe to go into the house to give her and Kate a private moment. Joe obliges her. Ann reveals a letter, written to her by Larry several years earlier. She did not want to share the letter with Kate but now she feels that she has no other way to settle the matter. Kate takes the letter and begins to read. Chris returns, interrupting the conversation by offering an apology to Ann. He is sorry for his cowardly behavior and for believing his father. He has decided to start a new life in Cleveland. Though he will not reveal Joe’s guilt to the authorities, he cannot bring himself to be anywhere near his father even though he believes that this makes him a coward. Ann wants to come with him but he refuses.

Joe returns and wants to defend himself. Chris warns his father that he is very angry. He may not be able to stop himself from attacking his father, he says. Joe is furious, accusing Chris of hypocrisy for living on the family money while accusing his father of a crime. He insists that his actions were normal for any business. There were many people who made money from the war; he was not unique. Chris concedes that this is true, even if it is distasteful. He is appalled that he ever looked up to his father.

Ann interrupts the argument by brandishing Larry’s letter. She begins to read Larry’s words aloud. In the letter, Larry reveals that he is debating whether to take his own life. He knows the truth about his father’s crime and he cannot “bear to live any more” (150), having read about Steve’s conviction in the newspaper. The letter shocks the family. Joe is plunged into a moment of quiet reflection; the pilots who died as the result of the broken engines, he says, were “all [his] sons” (151). He agrees to turn himself over to the authorities. He enters the house. Kate pleads with Chris to let the matter go. Chris cannot do this. He insists that the entire family must learn to accept reality, including the consequences. They must strive to be better. He is interrupted by the sound of a gunshot. Joe has shot himself. As Chris runs inside, Kate calls out to her husband. Chris returns, almost crying. Kate tells Chris that his father’s suicide is not his fault. He should continue to live his life, she insists, as the curtain falls on the stage.

Act III Analysis

Act III is defined by the crumbling delusions of the main characters. With the truth about Joe’s Greed and Self-Interest exposed, the characters are forced to confront the lies that they have told themselves to preserve their comfortable lives. Rather than bringing catharsis, however, this exposure of truth only brings more conflict. Joe and his son are at war, with Chris enraged at his father for destroying his idealistic image of American society. The conflict between Chris and Joe led Chris to leave briefly at the end of Act II, and Act III is punctuated by his return at a critical moment. Chris’s departure is a telling moment, as he feels a sudden urge to physically remove himself from the house, which is so heavy with symbolism. Joe bought the house and supported the family through means Chris now realizes were abhorrent. Joe allowed Steve to take the blame for his sins, destroying one family (as well as the families of the dead pilots) for the sake of his own. Chris’s internal conflict between Idealism and Cynicism reaches the point of crisis. He does not want to believe that the house and family that meant so much to him were only made possible through a direct contradiction of the idealistic principles around which he has built his personality. Chris is so torn that all he can do is remove himself from the house and distance himself from his conflict. The earlier talk of the need for a fresh start is no longer just theoretical. Now, Chris has had a fresh start thrust upon him. Whether he wants to or not, he cannot continue to be present in a house that now represents so much of what is wrong with the world, especially when it represented so much that was important to Chris just hours earlier.

While Chris is away, Ann continues bringing uncomfortable truths to the forefront of the family affairs. Just before his death, Larry wrote to her and explained why he planned to take his own life. She has known the truth for years but, like Chris and Joe, she allowed Kate (and others) to entertain the faint possibility that Larry might return. What was intended as an altruistic and comforting omission of truth is revealed to be incredibly damaging. Ann shows the letter to Kate, who cannot bring herself to share its contents with anyone else. The letter is devastating to Kate, who has built her identity around her opposition to the reality everyone else has come to accept. Amid the clamor of her husband’s guilt being exposed, she has lost the one comforting belief she had left. With her family in tatters, her delusion broken, and her husband facing very real legal jeopardy, she is in danger of losing everything.

All My Sons ends in a tragic flurry of action. Chris returns, seizes Larry’s letter, and loudly declares the truth to the world: Larry believed his father to be guilty and took his own life rather than live in such a world. Joe, who has long proclaimed to have done everything on his family’s behalf must now confront the truth: His crimes led to his son’s death. The house and the money mean nothing in contrast to the loss of Larry. Throughout the play, Joe has said that he would end his life if he no longer believed that he was acting in the best interests of his family. When his lies are exposed, when his role in Larry’s death is revealed, Joe can no longer delude himself. There is no longer any escape. There is a tragic irony in the way in which his suicide reverses the positions of Chris and Joe. At the beginning of the play, Joe cynically knew the truth but hid it out of Greed and Self-Interest while his son Chris treasured an idealistic (and possibly naïve) view of the world. By the end of the play, Chris’s idealism has been devastated. Whatever naivety he may once have had has been ruthlessly exposed. By contrast, Joe has nothing left. He follows through on one of the only promises he can actually keep, making true on his word by ending his life. There is a bitter idealism in Joe taking his life, a symbolic demonstration of his refusal to entertain his comfortable lies any longer. He faces down what he has done, finds it to contradict his stated beliefs, and follows through in the only way he can surmise. Joe was never an intelligent man. He was never a good man, despite what he told himself. In his final moment, however, he at least hoped that he would be an honest man.