“Wording Silence: The Case of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall”

After the Fall opens in a dimension which is ‘other’ with respect to the real world. After the fall of humanity and its loss of innocence, silence is in Quentin’s mind, as well as out of it. On the verge of a new marriage, Quentin feels the need to draw a balance of his life, by trying to give an appropriate language to his inner trouble, while his mind muses about the past to give a sense to the present. The challenge is, how to create a new, incorrupt language, which avoids “the sound and the fury” of the language of the world, where words are purified through introspection and self-analysis. Language must give voice to the unsaid, the unspeakable, since redemption passes through awareness and the acceptance of shared responsibility. Morality, order, law and a judging attitude are faced with the horrors perpetrated by mankind, which culminate in the Holocaust. The stream of consciousness of mind and vision intertwines with the stream of consciousness of language. By the end of this cathartic process, language is able to express the truth of mind and conscience. The language of law leaves the floor to words of love and forgiveness, which make possible the coexistence of morality and the Fall.