All My Sons

Toward the end of act 1 of All My Sons, Joe Keller explains what it was like to have been exonerated for the crime of knowingly supplying faulty aircraft cylinder heads during the war. He describes walking through the neighborhood, the apparent proof of his innocence in his pocket in the form of release papers. Neighbors who had been certain of his guilt were, he claims, obliged to admit his innocence through a combination of the trial verdict and his self-confidence. As he tells this story, Joe reveals a detail that is of no consequence to the plot but that establishes important aspects of the context: that the planes that crashed through his negligence came down in Australia: “I was the beast; the guy who sold cracked cylinder heads to the Army Air Force; the guy who made twenty-one P-40s crash in Australia. Kid, walkin’ down that street that...