Sheila’s actions force her to feel ‘sorry’ for what she’s done. Immediately she realises what has become of her actions and this makes us forgive her.
An effective technique used by Preistley to guide me towards feeling sympathetic to Sheila is what the character says. When the inspector reveals what Sheila’s done and the ultimate consequence- the girl’s suicide- we start to forgive her. She feels ‘ashamed’ and knows she’s ‘behaved badly’. ‘If she could help her now, she would’. She understands the whole family’s wrong doings and is one of the few to realise that they ‘aren't the same people who sat down to dinner’. When they realise that there wasn’t any suicide she tells the family to stop ‘pretending everything’s just as it was before’. We also like her because she sticks up for and helps the inspector in his enquiries, especially when he’s asking her mother. She thinks that what he mothers done is ‘cruel and vile’. And we feel like she’s truly learned the lesson of the play, that everyone should look after each other.
Another technique used by the playwright to make us forgive Sheila is the Inspector. Although we know that to some extent Sheila is responsible for the girl’s suicide we feel that she wasn’t that responsible and has been forgiven by the inspector when he says, ‘you helped-but didn’t start it’. J.B Priestley uses the inspector to make us feel more kindly upon Sheila.
The character that I think is second least to blame is Gerald Croft. Gerald Croft is engaged to Sheila Birling. Gerald’s father owns the company ‘Crofts Limited’. Gerald’s role in the suicide of the girl was the fact that she became his mistress. In the previous March he went to the ‘Palace Music Hall’ in Brumley for a drink, which was a ‘favourite haunt for women of the town’. He saw the girl and noticed that she was different and ‘very pretty’. She was being chatted up by a ‘half drunk and goggle-eyed’ Old Joe Meggarty and was ‘clearly not enjoying it’. When Gerald offered her a way out she ‘agreed at once’. He took her to the ‘County Hotel’, had a couple of drinks and some food. She explained about the life and the fact that she was ‘desperately hard up’. Gerald’s friend had given him the keys to some rooms while he went away and Gerald ‘ insisted that she moved into these rooms’ and he gave her money to live on. He was’ sorry for her’ and ‘didn’t ask for anything in return’. ‘Inevitably’ she became his mistress. ‘Gerald didn’t feel about her as she felt about him’ and in September they broke it off, although he gave her money until the end of the year.
After he tells the inspector and realises what he’s done he feels ‘sorry’, ‘upset’ and ‘wants to walk about for a while’. At this point in the play we feel sympathetic towards him because he seems to care and be sorry for his actions.
Our feelings, however, change when Gerald comes back from his walk after the Inspector has left. Any feelings of remorse from Gerald have gone. When he went for a walk, instead of thinking thinks through like we suspected him of doing, he had been asking a police officer about the Inspector. When he realises that a girl may not have committed suicide and they’re may not just be the one girl he thinks that what everyone has done is now alright because nothing bad has come from it. Gerald thinks ‘everything’s all right now’. He has not learned the lesson of the play. He thinks all can be forgotten about his affair and expects thinks to go back to normal with Sheila. We feel betrayed by this because of the compassion he showed earlier. We are glad when the telephone rings at the end because then finally he will learn his lesson.
A technique used by Priestley to make me feel some sympathy towards Gerald is his actions. Yes, he had an affair with her, but at least he made her ‘happy for a time’. He gave her shelter, food, money and company. He became ‘the most important person in her life’. He never ‘asked for anything in return’. Compared to the actions of Eric, what Gerald did wasn’t that bad at all.
Another technique used by the playwright is the use of a freeze frame. At the end of Act One the Inspector had mentioned the name of the girl-‘Daisy Renton’- and Gerald recognised that and instantly ‘gave himself away’. Gerald is not willing to give away information away easily and the end of Act One ends with the Inspector looking at him inquiringly and r saying ‘Well?’. This is followed by a freeze frame. This makes us, the audience, look at him to and think ‘Well? What has he done?’ The Inspector has to repeat his last words to get Gerald to confess. We feel a bit annoyed with Gerald because he doesn’t want to own up to what he’s done. The freeze frame used by Priestley makes him confess because he feels like all eyes are on him.
The character whom I believe to be 3rd to blame is Mr Birling. Mr Birling was a Industrialist and a Capitalist. He owned ‘Birling and Company’ and made lots of money by using ‘cheap labour’. The girl was employed by Mr Birling and worked at his factory for over a year. She was a ‘good worker’ and was promoted to be ‘head of a small group of girls’. When she ‘suddenly asked for more money’, Mr Birling ‘refused’ because she was already earning the average salary of ‘ twenty-two and six’. After the girl went on strike, Mr Birling sacked the girl from her job at his factory. He did this because ‘she had too much to say’.
Mr Birling feels like he’s done nothing wrong and that he ‘can’t accept responsibility’. If he did, he would feel ‘awkward’ and he’d be in an ‘impossible position’. He never blames him self and reckons ‘there is every excuse for what he did’ and thinks Eric ‘is the one to blame for this’. He doesn’t care about the girl and just think about what a ‘public scandal’ it will be and how it’s ruined his chance of getting a knighthood. The audience don’t like him for this because he shows no compassion towards the girl’s suicide.
When he finds out that there was no suicide and that Inspector Goole wasn’t on the police force he thinks it’s a ‘laugh’ and ‘joke’. We don’t like him because he hasn’t understood the message from the inspector. We are glad when the phone rings at the end because we feel he deserves it.
Priestley uses dramatic irony to undermine the character, Mr Birling. He uses this to make him look foolish. When, for example, he says about the Titanic being ‘unsinkable’ and ‘the silly little war scares’ we know he’s terribly wrong so when he says ‘ a man has to mind after his own business and look after himself’ we think he’s wrong about that as well.
Priestley uses lighting to make Mr Birling seem to be a bad and not very nice character. Before the Inspector arrives the lighting is ‘pink and intimate’ to show that the family is in the dark and oblivious about what they’ve done. When the Inspector arrives, however, the lighting becomes ‘brighter and harder’. This is because he comes to throw light on the situation and show them about their wrong doings and mistakes.
Another device used by the playwright to make us dislike Mr Birling is the Inspector. We feel that Mr Birling is to blame for the girl’s death because the Inspector tells him ‘he started it’. If Mr Birling hadn’t have fired her then the chain of events would have never happened and perhaps the girl would have never committed suicide.
The character that I think is second to blame is Mrs Birling. Priestley has constructed her in a way that guides us to dislike her throughout. She is a ‘prominent member of the Brumley Woman’s Charity Organisation’. ‘It’s an organisation to which women in distress can appeal for help in various forms’. She refused to help the girl, who was pregnant, because the girl was calling herself ‘Mrs Birling’. Mrs Birling thought that this was a ’trifle impertinence’ but the girl wasn’t doing it to be rude it was because the father was Eric.
Mrs Birling thinks that the girl ‘only had herself to blame’ and feels no sympathy towards her at all.
The playwright uses voice and vocabulary to make us dislike Mrs Birling. When she says, for example, ‘Trifle impertinence’, we think she’s a snobbish woman who thinks that she’s better than everyone else. Because the girl was poor she thinks that she doesn’t matter and are bad people. She expects suicide to be perfectly normal from ‘girls of that class’. She tries to bully the Inspector by saying ‘my husband was Lord Mayor, you know’.
Priestley uses dramatic irony to make Mrs Birling look foolish and undermine her. When questioning her she goes on about how the father of the baby is ‘entirely responsible’ while the audience know that Eric is the father. Because Priestley has built her up so we hate her, we can’t wait till the moment when she is humiliated and embarrassed by finding out her own son is the man who should be made responsible.
In the previous sequence of events Priestley also uses other devices, to make Mrs Birling look foolish. These are setting and time. Mrs Birling wasn’t very willing to give away information to the Inspector but she got caught up in the pace of the play and revealed things accidentally. The play is set entirely in the Dining Room of the house and is ‘comfortable but not cosy and homelike’. Because it’s set in the one room, it creates an intense, claustrophobic feeling like they’re being interrogated in a police cell. The play is set in real time and although this is to primarily to allow the audience to focus on the message it also makes it realistic, makes it tense, gives it real pace and importantly forces the characters to confess. These two devices, time and setting, link together to make Mrs Birling, and in fact all the characters to confess.
The character who I think is to blame above all the other principal characters is Eric Birling. Eric is in his early twenties, not quite at ease, half shy, half assertive and unbeknown to his parents, Eric is an alcoholic. On the night Eric met the girl, he was drunk and she was a bit too. He was at the Palace bar and began talking to her and he later went to her lodgings after ‘insisting’. The girl did not want him to go in but he was ‘in that state when a chap easily turns nasty’ and ‘threatened to start a row’. They met again and on the third time she told Eric that she was pregnant. ‘She had no money’,‘no job’ so Eric ‘insisted on giving her money to keep her going’, about 50 pounds worth, this money was stolen from Mr Birling’s office. ‘The girl discovered the money was stolen’ and ‘wouldn’t take anymore’ and ‘didn’t want to see Eric anymore’.
After Eric discovers what his actions resulted in he feels sorry but he blames his mother, ‘you (Mrs Birling) killed her, and your own grandchild, you killed them both’. He is truly upset when he finds out that both the girl and his baby are dead and has learnt his lesson. He understands that they should all be ‘ashamed’. He agrees with Sheila in that fact that it didn’t matter if he was a real police officer or not because ‘he was their police inspector’. We feel slightly warmer towards him because he feels truly sorry for what he’s done but what he’s done cannot be easily forgiven. He treated her like an ‘animal, not a person’.
Priestley uses the device of freeze frame to make us question Eric. At the end of Act Two, we have discovered that Eric is the father of the girl’s baby. As Eric walks through the door, he is met with the other characters ‘inquiring stares’.
It makes us stare at him and because the freeze frame is held it makes us think that Eric must have done something ‘it doesn’t make any real difference’ if it really bad. All the explanations possible go through our head and we can’t wait to discover what has happened.
The main reason for Eric being the most to blame for the death of the girl is simply for what his actions did to her. In his own words, ‘he got a bit squiffy’, the word ‘squiffy’ suggests he isn’t really taking it seriously, and forced himself upon her and treated her like an ‘animal’ because he could. After discovering he had made her pregnant he gave her stolen money, when she discovered this she couldn’t take any more, this suggests that she has better morals than Eric. Although Eric is sorry for what he’s done, we cannot for give him for what he’s done like we did, for example, with Gerald. At least Gerald ‘made her happy for a time and showed her affection’, but Gerald did nothing good for her. Without the actions of Eric, the girl’s life wouldn’t have been so bad, and ultimately, she may have not committed suicide.
All the principal characters were all responsible for the suicide of the girl but some more than others. Priestley has used several devices to guide us to this decision, these include language, stagecraft, characterisation and others. Sheila and Gerald have had some part to play in this tragedy, but their involvement was small and has been forgiven. Mr Birling, Mrs Birling and Eric, however, have had a massive part to play in the suicide of the girl. It is terrible that only two of the principal characters, Sheila and Eric, have learned the lesson of the play and Inspector Goole while the rest of the characters, Gerald, Mrs Birling and Mrs Birling all believe that because there wasn’t an actual death there actions are now all right. The playwright wrote this play to show his socialist view and various aspects in his life have influenced ‘An Inspector Calls’. The message is that everyone should get along and help each other. By the end of the play the audience have learned the lesson from the play, even if some of the characters haven’t.
