Discuss the Role of the Inspector in An Inspector Calls

Birlings, he controls the development of events: who will speak and

when; who may or may not leave; who will or will not see the

photograph. He even Priestley describes the Inspector, when he first

appears on stage, in terms of 'massiveness, solidity and

purposefulness' (p.11), symbolizing the fact that he is an unstoppable

force within the play. His 'disconcerting habit of looking hard at the

person he addresses before speaking' (p.11) gives the impression that

he sees through surface appearances to the real person beneath. It

also gives him a thoughtfulness that contrasts with the

thoughtlessness of each character's treatment of the girl.

His role in the play is not simply to confront each character with the

truth, but to force each character to admit the truth they already

know. He works methodically through the characters present one at a

time, partly because he recognizes that 'otherwise, there's a muddle'

(p.12), and partly because, given the chance, the characters are all

quick to defend each other, or to call upon outside help (such as

Colonel Roberts) in order to avoid accepting the truth of what he

suggests.

He arrives just after Birling has been setting out his views of life:

that every man must only look out for himself. The Inspector's rule is

to show that this is not the case. Throughout the play he demonstrates

how people are responsible for how they affect the lives of others;

his views are summed up in his visionary and dramatic final speech:

that 'we are members of one body. We are responsible for each other'

(p.56). Responsibility is one of the play's two key themes, and the

Inspector is Priestley's vehicle for putting across his own views of

this as a socialist. In this final speec...

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...led as both an alcoholic and a thief.

After the Inspector has gone, Birling simply wants things to return to

the way they were. He cannot understand Sheila's and Eric's insistence

that there is something to be learnt, and he is relieved and

triumphant when he feels that scandal has been avoided and everything

is all right. Right up until the end, he claims that 'there's every

excuse for what both your mother and I did - it turned out

unfortunately, that's all' (p.57).

Birling is not the cold and narrow-minded person that his wife is; he

simply believes in what he says. He is a limited man, who is shown to

be wrong about many things in the play; it is the Birlings of the

world whom Priestley feared - in 1945 - would not be willing or able

to learn the lessons of the past, and so it is to the younger

generation that Priestley hopefully looked instead...