Inspector Calls - How effectively does Priestley convey his message?

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Inspector Calls Coursework

How effectively does Priestley convey his message?

An Inspector Calls was written by J.B. Priestley in 1945 but is set in an earlier period before World War I. The play concerns the Birlings who are celebrating their daughter’s engagement to Gerald Croft. Fairly early on in the play an inspector arrives investigating a suicide. Due to his arrival the evening is ruined for the Birlings, but some of the family learn some important moral values about life during the course of the evening. Priestley believed in responsibility and preached a compassionate and broad type of socialism. The Inspector, an enigmatic figure, is used to portray this message. It is through the idea of the detective thriller, that Priestley conveys his moral message, which particularly had considerable dramatic impact on the audiences at that time.

The first scene reveals how the Birlings are before the Inspector arrives. They are enjoying a celebratory engagement dinner. They seem like a respectable, happy family and Arthur Birling is delighted about the wedding match because his daughter’s fiancé is the son of a prosperous business rival, Sir George Croft, who he views as his social superior. Arthur Birling is somewhat sensitive to the fact that Gerald’s parents may feel that their son is marrying ‘beneath himself’.   Arthur Birling wishes to enlarge his self-importance as a hardheaded practical businessman and former Lord Mayor and Magistrate. During the dinner speech Arthur Birling explains his optimistic vision of the world. He dismisses the prospect of a future war, strikes, and places his total faith in advances in technology.  The world is a comfortable place for him but his views are revealed through history as incorrect.  In a later speech he sets out his basic belief that a man should look after himself and his family, ‘a man has to make his own way – has to look after himself – and his family too, of course, when he has one – and so long as he does that he won’t come to much harm, demonstrating he is a product of his time expressing views of a self-made businessman in Edwardian England. He takes no notice of the people who express views that people should have a responsibility for each other in society.  ‘The way some of these cranks talk and write now, you’d think everybody has to look after everybody else, as if we were all mixed up together like bees in a hive – community and all that nonsense’.  

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The Inspector uses a number of techniques when questioning. He creates an impression of purposefulness which he uses to conduct his inquiries. One of his techniques is to claim that he knows little but draws confessions from the most secretive of people, like Sybil Birling. The Inspector has a disconcerting habit of looking hard at the person he is questioning before speaking which unnerves the suspects. He makes it clear that his purpose is to establish exactly whom it is that has made ‘a nasty mess’ of Eva Smith’s life and emphasises in graphic imagery her death to shock all ...

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