Perhaps the most interesting character in "All My Sons" is that of Joe Keller, the self-made patriarch with a desperation to pass on his business to his son, but also a colder, more hardened ability to shirk blame and gladly hand it to somebody else. At the very beginning of Act One, we are introduced to Keller through the stage directions, which state that 'When he reads, when he speaks, when he listens, it is with the terrible concentration of the uneducated man for 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' (Miller 5-6). This element of Keller's nature, his lack of education, is something which appears more than once during the play and has a particular significance. Keller is something of a self-made man, a hard worker with an almost exaggerated desire to pass on his business to his son, Chris. .
This burning need to achieve the 'American Dream' drives Keller to atrocious behavior. However, this notion of the 'American Dream' has fooled him, it has tricked him into believing that in this new post-war world hard-work is all one needs in order to be respected and good. He rails that "everybody's gettin' so Goddam educated in this country there'll be nobody to take away the garbage[] It's gettin' so the only dumb ones left are the bosses" (Miller 48). The sensitivity that Joe Keller has regarding his education is fairly clear here. Keller is unable to keep up with the times, struggling to understand how anybody could make money from old dictionaries – "All the kind of business is goin' on. In my day, either you were a lawyer, or a doctor, or a doctor, or you worked in a shop" (Miller 7). .
Joe Keller has been blinded by his obsession with keeping his secret and his business. Throughout the play, the opinions of others are clearly of great importance to the characters, and for Keller, the thought of losing his business was too much to bear and he was willing to sacrifice literally anything in order to hold on to it.
