All My Sons

Comparative · 2028 Leaving Cert

Arthur Miller’s All My Sons is a new prescribed comparative text for the 2028 Leaving Cert. It is a tight, three-act drama about one family, one buried decision, and the morning the truth finally arrives in the back garden.

The play is set in the Keller family’s backyard in an American town a few years after the Second World War. Joe Keller ran a factory that made aircraft parts. During the war his plant shipped a batch of cracked cylinder heads, and the planes that carried them crashed, killing twenty-one pilots. Joe’s business partner went to prison for it. Joe walked free, and life in the garden looks comfortable until the day everything that was hidden starts to surface.

You only need to track a small cast. Joe Keller is the father who insists he did everything for his family. Kate, his wife, refuses to accept that their pilot son Larry is dead and clings to the belief he will return. Chris, the surviving son, idealises his father and wants to marry Ann. Ann was once Larry’s girlfriend and is the daughter of Joe’s imprisoned partner. Hanging over all of them is Larry, gone in the war, and a letter he left behind that will not let the family keep its story intact.

For the Comparative course this is a strong fit for Theme or Issue, where moral responsibility and guilt drive every scene. It also rewards a Cultural Context reading, given the pressure of family, money and reputation in post-war small-town America, and it can be studied as Literary Genre for how Miller builds tension across a single day in a single setting. Wherever it sits on your course, its clearest, most distinctive comparative angle is responsibility.

One more thing makes the play manageable to study. Everything happens in one place over roughly one day, so you are never lost tracking subplots or jumps in time. The whole drama tightens around a single garden, a single family, and a secret that has nowhere left to go.

Study All My Sons

Start with the angle that makes this play unmistakable in a Comparative answer: the question of who is responsible when a private decision costs other people their lives.