An Inspector Call

An Inspector Call

Responsibility n being responsible; a moral obligation or duty; a

charge or trust; a thing one is responsible for.

Responsibility is very important in the play, because no body was

actually officially fully blamed. So Priestley leaves it up to the

audience to decide who is to blame, if anyone. If the so-called Eva

Smith really existed, and if the inspector was really.

Gerald:"That man wasn't a police officer." (Page 62)

Birling:"There you are! Proof positive. The whole story's just a lot

of moonshine" (Page 70)

At the time Priestley wrote this book there was very large boundaries

between the rich and the poor where huge. So he wrote this book on

responsibility. So from what I know, I think the reason why Priestley

used a rich family to base the play around is because wealthy people

thought they were on a morally different plane. They felt were not

accountable for anything, so Priestly made them vulnerable to show

they were human and so had to conform to the same morals and ethics.

Sheila: "he knows. Of course he knows. And I hate to think how much

he knows that we don't know yet." (Page 26)

This gives the play more power, knowing the rich are vulnerable, even

though they have threatened and attempted to bribe the Inspector to

get out of trouble.

Birling: "How do you get on with our Chief Constable, Colonel Roberts?

I see him fairly frequently. We play golf together" (Page 16)

This extra punch is given because; at the time it was made the rich

were still almost invulnerable, they could not be touched by a

commoner, and yet in this play a complete stranger - who is obviously

less affluent than them, practically demolishes their lives.

The life-style of the poor in that era was extremely bad - they worked

extortionate hours for low pay and lived I slums. This meant the poor

never had a glimmer of happiness:

Gerald: "she was desperately hard up and at that moment was actually

hungry" (Page 36)

The play is the tale of a rich family, that are accosted by a man

claiming to be a police inspector. The family members have sometime

bad to a woman two of them were called Eva Smith and Daisy Renton.

Inspector Goole pulls all of these incidents together and bluffs his

way through the family's questions until they believe that it was a

singular girl.

The family then move through a process of blaming each other for

pushing this girl to commit suicide, and thinking that their lives and

family name is ruined. Then the family discover that Mr Goole is in