Who is inspector Goole and what is his function in the play? How may his role be shown in a performance of the play? J.B Priestlys' 'An Inspector Calls'.

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Mohammed 10i

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Who is inspector Goole and what is his function in the play?

How may his role be shown in a performance of the play?

J.B Priestly wrote the celebrated play ‘An Inspector Calls’ at the height of his powers as a playwright. Although the play was written at the end of WW2 in 1945 it is set in a spring evening in 1912, 2 years before WW1.

Edwardian society at that time (1912) was strictly divided into social classes and over two-thirds of the nations wealth was in the hands of less than 1% of the population. Below the very rich were the middle classes (doctors, merchants, shop workers and clerks), after that came the craftsmen and skilled workers. At the very bottom of the social ladder was the largest class of all- the ordinary workers and the poor, many of whom lived below the poverty level. The men of industry treated the workers very badly and they were paid a pittance. This caused workers to become more organised and strikes were becoming more frequent as they demanded better conditions and higher pay.

 Priestly was writing this play for a middle class audience and was speaking up for the working class by showing how the Birlings and Gerald Croft were all involved in making a young working class girl’s life a misery. Priestly wanted to show us that we have a responsibility to others to act fairly and without prejudice and that we do not live in isolation. Our actions affect others. Priestly does so through the characters in the play. He uses the inspector to voice his own socialist opinions and the Birlings are used to show how not to behave.

The Inspector’s role in the play is a very critical one as he appears in the play to disapprove the Birlings capitalist views. His role is to play the narrator. When he isn’t piecing Eva’s life story together through questions, he is narrating the gaps in her life. Goole brings her splintered life together into one cohesive story.

 The inspector is not at all an ordinary inspector because he gives himself a moral duty, which makes him behave in certain ways that an ordinary inspector would not do. He is more concerned with right and wrong than with what is legal. He is a moralist. He sternly tells Birling, for example, “it’s better to ask for the earth (as a worker might do) than to take it (which Birling does)”. He has a peculiar habit of looking hard at the person he addresses before actually speaking which could suggest that he sees through the person he is addressing and knows their secrets before they even say anything. He is not afraid to contradict and be rude to his social superiors, powerful and influential men like Birling. In fact the inspector is threatening Mr Birling in his tone of voice and saying how he’s a suspect of Eva smith’s suicide. This is shown in act 3 pg 51 when the inspector says to Mr Birling “ she wanted twenty-5 chillings a week instead of twenty-two and sixpence. You made her pay a heavy price for that. And now she’ll make you pay a heavier price still”.

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It looks like the inspector in lecturing the family rather then interrogating them. For example when (act 1) Mr Birling says that him firing Eva smith has got nothing to do with her suicide the inspector says “what happened to her then may of determined what happened to her afterwards, and what happened to her afterwards may have driven her to suicide. A chain of events”. Whereas a normal inspector would just take notes and not say anything like that. He also delivers a strange almost biblical speech (and it has nothing to do with his job as a ...

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