The 1945 audience knew the fate of the Titanic and so Mr. Birling immediately appears in a bad light although to be fair his view was that of everyone in 1912 and so he is a stereotype of society then. Mr. Birling's attitude is shown in his words, "...A man has to make his own way/has to look after himself" and, referring to the working class, "If you don't come down sharply on some of these people they'll soon be asking for the earth". Mr. Birling has a selfish attitude towards life, and also an attitude to only care for him and family, and basically forget everybody else. This is exactly what he tells in a speech at the celebration of Sheila's and Gerald's engagement, "... a man has to look after himself - and his family too, of course..." which gives the impression of selfishness, and also greed. Another example of this is when he tells a speech about how it is the best day of his life, "Gerald, I'm going to tell you frankly, without any pretences, that your engagement with Sheila means a lot to me …Your just the type of son-in-law I wanted..." This makes people think whether he wants them to get married for themselves, or for him, and whether it means a lot to him sentimentally, or a lot to him in the business world.
The form that ‘An inspector Calls’ is written in is a modern social drama: it is naturalistic in form, and deals with social and domestic issues in the style of realism. This is seen from the beginning by Priestley's attention to detail when describing the stage at the beginning. He specifies "good solid furniture of the period", and the stage directions remind the director that "all five are in evening dress of the period, the men in tails and white ties, not dinner jackets". This kind of attention to detail indicates a naturalist method. By copying reality closely, you make the audience believe that what they are seeing is real. The fact that all that follows in the play takes place in the time it would take in reality is another sign of naturalism.
But also, the play borrows from the medieval tradition of the morality play because it uses allegory to teach us a simple moral lesson. Priestley has taken this form of drama and mixed it in with the naturalist drama. The character of the Inspector is less realistically a human being than a super policeman - the character represents the theoretical idea of the human conscience, a force which never forgets, and makes someone feel responsible for their actions. A conscience is also responsible for guilt, in the same way that a policeman is responsible for catching the guilty.
"An Inspector Calls" is a well-structured and well-made play because it contains many factors that captivate and sustain the attention of the audience. One of the factors that makes the play captivating is the use of climax, the way it holds the audience all the way through, building up slowly, gathering the plot as it goes on and then finally ends in a stunning climax, for example the way the Inspector extracts small threads of information from the members of the family and slowly puts the picture together and narrows it down to the main culprit as the climax.
The whodunit genre keeps the audience guessing all the way through the play, and as clues are solved and stories are unfurled the culprit becomes clearer, but as soon as one thinks he or she knows who it is Priestley cleverly seems to switch to the inspecting of another character. This makes the audience engrossed in the action that is happening on-stage.
During the course of the play Arthur Birling becomes Priestley’s representative for ideas that he, as the author, disagrees with. By making Mr. Birling a highly un-likeable character Priestley immediately gains the support of the audience in his viewpoints. The audience especially dislikes Mr. Birling because when the play was first shown in 1945 people were still recovering from the affects of war. Mr. Birling expresses his political viewpoints in an arrogant manor. “Take my word you youngsters- and I’ve learnt it in the good hard school of experience- a man has to look after himself and his own." One of the reasons for setting the play in the past is evident quite early on in the first act: it allows Priestley to let Mr Birling lead himself up the garden path in his historical predictions, and show him to be wrong in his whole outlook on the world. Knowing what will happen in the next few decades, the audience sees how Birling’s complacent predictions about history are completely wrong. He claims there is no chance of war (in 1912 the first rumblings of war were being heard), but he says: “Just because the Kaiser makes a speech or two, or a few German officers have too much to drink and begin talking nonsense, you'll hear some people say war's inevitable. And to that I say - fiddlesticks! The Germans don't want war”. Everyone knows what was to happen in two years' time - the First World War. Birling also has an unshakeable belief in progress, and it is industrialists like him who are leading the way. As a symbol of the unstoppable progress made by industrial capitalism, he points to the huge ocean liner, the Titanic:
“Forty six thousand eight hundred tons - New York in five days - and every luxury - and unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable”. The titanic was to hit an iceberg and sink in its maiden voyage
All these are examples of dramatic irony used in the play. Priestley uses dramatic irony in an attempt to use Birling’s foolishness to lighten up the atmosphere in the play. When talking about the next couple of decades, Birling foresees ever increasing prosperity and peace and predicts that in 1940: “You'll be living in a world that'll have forgotten all these Capital versus Labour agitations and all these silly little war scares”. But in 1940 the characters Birling is talking to will be in the middle of the Second World War. In addition, labour unhappiness has continued for the remainder of the 20th century.
The reason for the questionings of the family is evident in the play - through the trials of the Birling family, larger social issues are explored. Although all of the action takes place in a middle-class family residence, the audience is exposed to a whole lot more of the city of Brumley: the conditions of factory life, pick-up joints (the Palace), political corruption, the power of the rich to destroy working-class lives... One of the achievements of the play is that it shows the connectedness and interdependence of people living in society. While the rich think they can hide from the world of pain which they exploit, the play shows how it comes back to ‘haunt them in their castles’.
This book is very allegorical because the characters and events are representing other things and symbolically expressing a deeper spiritual and moral meaning. Priestley was trying to show the predominantly middle class audience that despite all the death and destruction of the Great War, the working class were no better off. The 1920's and 1930's were a time of unemployment, strikes and depression. This time around, Priestley says, things could really improve if only people were to become more socially responsible for the welfare of others. We have to confront our mistakes and learn from them. The fact that his use of time sometimes makes it seem as if events have not yet happened and the characters might have a chance to change their actions, reflects this - there was a Second World War and people have a second chance to change things. The older Birlings represent those who failed to learn from the First World War, while Sheila and Eric are the younger generation who still have a chance to learn and change. In conclusion, this play is a comment on the society of the Edwardian age, as well as being a play about relationships as a whole. Priestley sets out to show the failings of that society and succeeds.
