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All My Sons By Arthur Miller

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Dramatic tension is a figurative device an author would use to add tension to conflict between characters. In Arthur Miller’s play, All My Sons, dramatic tension is created by using theoretical devices and language, utilizing conflicting character personalities, dramatic irony, and character development, to exhibit dramatic tension in order to keep the audience engaged in the play. ACT 1 At the beginning of Act One, when Keller gives the audience first impressions of characters, the audience begins to foreshadow conflicts between the characters based on each individual character’s personality, this is one of the first examples of foreshadowing conflict for the audience. “KELLER is nearing sixty. A heavy man of stolid mind and build, a business man these many years, but with the imprint of the machine-shop working and boss still upon him. When he reads, when he speaks, when he listens, it is with the terrible concentration of the uneducated man from whom there is still wonder in many commonly known things, a man whose judgements must be dredged out of experience and a peasant-like common sense. A man among men.” (6). When Miller describes Joe Keller in the beginning of the play, he describes him from the perspective of somebody who has a well thought out first impression of him, giving the audience an impression of him. When Miller describes Keller as “A man among men.” (6), the audience can assume he is indifferent to others, Miller still maintains a description of Joe

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