His tortured process of self-discovery fights against an unwillingness, an innate fear of unearthing what Miller calls “the seeds of his own destruction.” It is the fundamental need to know that serves as the backbone of what is otherwise a loosely structured play. As a result, “After the Fall” becomes a big, demanding drama (when staged, the play usually occupies a full three and a half hours), doggedly exposing Quentin’s “pointless litigation of existence” in order to find not only whether his has been a life “lived in good faith,” but whether he can move beyond self-condemnation to some measure of hope. Quentin zeroes in on distorted emotions, marital complexities, and other intimate struggles. That one moved not in a dry circle but on an upward path toward some elevation, where. But underlying it all, I see now, there was a presumption. When you are young you prove how brave you are, or smart then, what a good lover then, a good father finally, how wise, or powerful, or what-the-hell-ever. more and more I see that for many years I looked at life like a case at law. Here the moralist (and retired attorney) Quentin sits in judgment upon his own conscience, his own values, his own actions: The play’s protagonist, Quentin, in whose mind the play’s set pieces take place, subscribes to the simple rule: “You tell the truth, even against yourself.” The play is fabricated as a trial or, more fittingly, an inquest. Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall” takes the form of an investigation into the forces which give rise to incomplete and destructive human relationships.

Miller after the fall