Fathers and Sons

All My Sons by Arthur Miller has been argued by many to be a modern tragedy while others claim that his play, All My Sons, cannot be considered a tragedy. However, to truly debate if Miller was able to created a modern tragedy, one must first know what a tragedy is. “Tragedy”, as first coined by Aristotle, a famous Greek philosopher, is defined as a play that portrays the fall of a good character because of a catastrophic mistake by the protagonist. A true tragedy must also evoke pity and fear…

in Brooklyn, in the postwar years, at the end of the 1940s. The play tells us about the 60 years old, unhappy salesman Willy Loman, his family, and his misunderstanding of achieving the American Dream. We see four main characters: Willy Loman - the father of the family, Linda - his wife, Biff and Happy - his kids. The play begins with the fact that Willy is forced to return home from a trip, without money. Throughout his life he wanted only one thing - to get rich. He was inspired by the story…

criminal, as if it were a button to an overcoat. As time goes on, that string is worn from stress, making it more susceptible to snap. Just like a string, all guilt has a snapping point. Joe Keller is the protagonist in Arthur Miller's play All My Sons, who is consumed by the guilt of killing innocent World War II pilots. The guilt of this tragedy is unbearable for Keller, as it drives him to insanity and ultimately compels him to commit suicide. Keller's greatest enemy is his internal demon. He…

by the age gap between the father and the son. Different generations of a family have different views on how one should live their own lifestyle. This is demonstrated through the father as he does not want to accept how his son has adopted such western views as he is growing up. The narrator states how “[her] brother was born in Malaysia, but when he immigrated [to] Canada, the language left him” and she claims that “he forgot it, or he refused it”. This makes the father angry due to a belief…

The Prodigal God The parable of the prodigal son is one of my favorites possibly because of how often it has been preached and how much I "thought" I knew all about its meaning. When I look back over my experiences I realize that many of our awesome preachers have all been focused on the returning son and never really given the older brother much thought. Author Timothy Keller has a very unusual and distinctive theological approach to presenting both sons as failures in the eyes of the Lord,…

the doors open. In the poem “Those Winter Sundays” (prepositional phrase) by Robert Hayden the son is scared, fearing his father and the strained past that lingers in the house. The bond that the father and son share is the fire the father builds every morning to keep his son warm. The deed goes unnoticed. Robert Hayden used allusions and repetition in his work to express the bond between the father and son through the fights that left damage, but…

is a son that is raised in a lifestyle that revolves around fishing on a boat. However, the son has repressed thoughts about gaining knowledge and studying instead of living his life on the boat. Even though his father urges him to study instead of working on the boat, the son is pressured by his mother to stay. Also, he does not want to leave his father behind so he decides to take on more responsibilities on the boat. The pressure causes the son to be torn from both of his parents. The son…

Through the father’s fear of breaking his relationship between himself and his son because of his lackluster-story-telling ability, the poem “A Story” conveys the strained and complex relationship between a father and his son. The poem use different literary devices to create a vivid picture of the father’s dread of abandonment by his and of the innocence son exudes as he asks for new story via tone and point of view. The Li-Young Lee manipulates tone throughout the poem to explain why the…

older. This is the basis of Seamus Heany’s poem “Follower” in which the speaker, a little boy, the son of a man who plows fields of dirt shares his experience of following his father when he was working and how much he inspires to be like his father. The speaker starts the poem by telling the reader what his father does and how his father looks. Through the strenuous work that the speaker’s father does for a living the speaker tells us that “[his] shoulders globed like a full sail strung…

“My Papa’s Waltz” Author Theodore Roethke wrote “My Papa’s Waltz”. Is a poem where the father is introduced as papa, and son is helping the father once more as they reenact the waltz through the house because he has been drinking too much. The son, and father have a close relationship because he doesn’t call him dad or “father” like most do. The young boy calls him “papa” in the poem as he helps him through the kitchen. Since papa is drunk again, the mom who is also there does not help him, and…