“No thank you Mr Birling. I’m on duty.
The inspector speaks carefully, weightily and has disconcerting habit of looking hard at the person he addresses before actually speaking.
The inspector treats the other characters as if they had all sinned he tries to make all the characters reveal all about what they had done to Eva Smith. The inspector seems to know everything about the characters he makes them feel uncomfortable he asks the characters probing questions to draw information from them. The inspector believes that everyone should be treated the same and not to treat anyone badly. He favors the common man more than he favors the rich man. The inspector is on the side of the working class.
The inspector could be like a spirit or a ghost because he knows the past present and the future. He is the characters voice of conscience because he tells the characters what each of them has done wrong he tries to tell them that hey have done wrong and should be punished.
He forewarns of things to come because he tells each of the characters the future he predicts things to come. The inspector is like a God like figure because he is an all seeing all knowing figure. The inspector does I feel sound like Priestley because Priestley was a socialist because he did not like business people or the rich folk of the time he thought that the rich people did not like the poor and the workers that worked for them in the factories and treated them badly and were given poor low wages and had to work long hours while the richer people got richer and the poorer people got poorer and poorer.
Priestly was a socialist he was on the side of the workers. Priestly does not want one single interpretation because he wants to get the audience to think to keep them interested in the play.
Inspector Goole is like a priest because the family in the play confess to him what they have all done for example Gerald admits to the inspector that he had been having an affair with Eva Smith but she was calling herself Daisy Renton when he says “No I wasn’t telling a complete lie when I said I’d been busy. But of course I did see a good deal of her.”
The inspector is the voice of social conscience because he implies that the family treated Eva Smith badly because of her social class if she was upper class citizen she would have been treated completely different to the way was she was lower class citizen that is why she was treated the way she was. This made the family all feel bad and guilty for what they all had done except Mrs Birling. The fact that each of them in their own way abused her and their social class.
However there was only one person that did not accept the fact she was the same as the lower classes it was Mrs Birling she thinks that because she is rich she has the right to treat people as she feels and they should always treat her with respect. The quote of “fire blood and anguish” shows the inspector as a figure who can see into the future if the inequality of classes isn’t abolished, for example the Titanic sinking the most people who died were the working class, and also the richest people did not want to be mixing with the lower class so they half filled the life boats. This is a reminder to the people of 1945 that all these things that happened from 1912 onwards that because of the way people were that all the disasters happened.
In conclusion I think that Goole was a dramatic voice of conscience I think this because he already knows the story, he is like something in the back of the Birlings minds I think this because at the end of the story when the inspector goes Gerald calls the hospital to see about Eva Smith when he finds no one is there named Eva Smith. Then soon the telephone rings the police ring to let the Birlings know that a girl has just died and they were a police inspector was on his way round to ask some questions. There the play ends.
The Birlings are resultant to realize that they all have treated good people badly because of their position in society. I think that the factor of the audience not knowing not knowing anything at all about the inspector plays an important role because it shows that he could be anything or anyone who knows what’s going to happen in the future.
