Art holds the ability to tell a story. Not only does it tell a story through it’s explicit elements, such as a play’s plot or a monument’s quotations, but also in the context that they are implemented. In order to truly garner the message of any artwork, it is important to factor in why and how their elements exist. Two different pieces of art, the World War II Memorial and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons both seek to portray aspects of World War II. However, the ways in which they do so differ due to the varying inherent constraints of the medium. While the monument and the play do so in different ways, they both memorialize similar themes of World War II such as how war affected American ideals at the start of the war, war-time collectivism, …show more content…
To Keller, the family represented the broadest collective effort. However, what he failed to realise is that to everyone else in war-time America, the biggest effort was America itself, and therefore the war. It’s his failure to recognize the [mood] of the era which contributed to his downfall. His guilt stems from his realisation that he was supposed to be responsible not only for his actual sons, but for each of his metaphorical sons, the pilots. His other son, Chris, acts as a [contrast] to this. Chris is able to acknowledge and [appreciate] this and he explains this sense of camaraderie to his fiancee, Ann: “When you drive that car, you’ve got to know that it came out of the love a man can have for a man...Otherwise, what you have is really loot, and there’s blood on it” (Miller 36). These differing prioritizations of individual responsibility versus collective responsibility is what ultimately drives a wedge into the Keller