“We are responsible for each other” and it places further emphasis on collective responsibility. The Inspector aims to change their views on responsibility, and does so by describing to each of the characters how they all contributed to the suicide of Eva Smith. Mr Birling feels his main responsibility is to make a success of his business, and he has no qualms about dealing severely with workers that do not accept his rules with,
“They wanted the rates raised, I refused of course” demonstrating this. Mrs Birling’s responsibility lies primarily within her role as chairwoman of the Women’s Charity Organisation, but despite seeing how deserving Eva Smith was of receiving help, Mrs Birling remained intransigent in refusing to provide her with the support that she needed. Priestley has created characters like this to highlight the effect people can have on others if they do not accept responsibility for their own actions.
Priestley successfully achieves his aims of showing that all people are part of an interdependent community by highlighting the importance of collective responsibility within ‘An Inspector Calls’. By making the Inspector the primary source of information in the play, Priestley uses the Inspector as device by which he is able to express his own opinions. Each of the stories that involve Eva Smith all describe different moral situations that led to a tragedy.
The main function of the Inspector in ‘An Inspector Calls’ is to highlight the importance of collective responsibility by acting as device by which Priestley can express his views to the audience. The Inspector can be seen as a supernatural character by his ability to control the development of events in the story. As the story of each character develops, the Inspector grows in confidence and gains control over the characters. The Birlings accept that he is able to decide who is allowed to speak, who is allowed to leave, and who is allowed to see the photograph, although they know nothing about him. Despite the dismissive behaviour of Mr and Mrs Birling, the Inspector is set on probing the characters, and nothing distracts him. He is manipulative in the way he interviews and has an ability to get people to answer all of his questions, which is indicated by, “Somehow he makes you”. He appears to be more concerned with what is morally right or wrong rather than what is legal or illegal.
The character of Eva Smith is used by Priestley to illustrate his political and social views in order to attempt to change the audiences’ attitudes towards others. Due to the lack of information given about Eva Smith, she is an abstract character within the play, and her primary role is to represent the effects that people’s actions have on one other. She never appears on stage, and the audience never discovers her real name, which adds to the curious nature of her character. We learn that each of the characters in ‘An Inspector Calls’ changed Eva’s life in some way, and we learn that this eventually led to her suicide. It is suggested that she has strong moral values which can be shown from her refusal to take the stolen money from Eric. She represents the ordinary working class section of society and her lack of money means her life is in stark contrast to that of the Birling and Croft family. The five stories that are based around Eva are used to show the different events that happen to female individuals in the lower class. Priestley uses Eva’s suicide to allow the reader to recognise our responsibility to others and to change our attitudes to those we meet. In the Inspectors final speech, he emphasises the importance of collective responsibility by saying,
“ One Eva Smith has gone- but there are millions and millions of Eva Smith’s still left with us”.
In ‘An Inspector Calls’, Priestley uses the different characters to reflect specific areas of society to fulfil his aims of making people recognise the affect that our actions have on those around us. The characters each have different reactions relating to the death of Eva Smith, a woman whose suicide they have all supposedly contributed to in some way. Mr Birling has a lack of sympathy for Eva, emphasised when he calls her ‘that wretched girl’ and immediately he forgets about the consequences of his actions once his finds out from the infirmary the girl does not exist. Eric and Sheila can relate to each other because they both recognise that their choices and actions in life have affected other people, and they try to learn from the outcomes of this. When Eric comments,
“The money’s not the important thing. It’s what happened to the girl”, it is clear to the reader he has accepted his responsibility involving Eva’s death. Mrs Birling is so concerned with her own self image that she doesn’t care about the mistakes she has made in life, so long as it has no affect on herself or her family. Despite knowing that she has made mistakes, she chooses to ignore her faults and puts the blame onto other people. Comments such as,
“You are quite wrong to suppose I shall regret what I did” describe Mrs Birling’s indignation at being told she is partly to blame for Eva’s death. Gerald is a much more balanced character within the play, and he remains sceptical of the Inspector throughout. Quotations such as, ‘Is it a fact?’ support Gerald’s scepticism. He too appears to forget about the lessons he has learnt when he finds out that Eva Smith did not exist.
In “An Inspector Calls”, Priestley emphasis the importance of collective responsibility to enable the reader to understand that our actions affect those around us. He achieves this successfully by using the characters and situations to convey the inequalities of society and the impact that each of us can have on others.
