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AN INSPECTOR CALLS ANALYSIS
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Transcript
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Introduction
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CONTEXT
PLOT
THEMES
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Context
J B Priestley wrote An Inspector Calls after the First World War and like much of his work contains controversial, politically charged messages.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/english_literature/dramainspectorcalls/0drama_inspector_contrev3.shtml
An Inspector Calls is set in 1912.
An Inspector Calls was written in 1945.
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The Birling family are spending a happy evening celebrating the engagement of Sheila Birling to Gerald Croft - a marriage that will result in the merging of two successful local businesses. Yet, just when everything seems to be going so well, they receive a surprise visit from an Inspector Goole who is investigating the suicide of a young girl.
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THEMES:
In An Inspector Calls, the central theme is responsibility. Priestley is interested in our personal responsibility for our own actions and our collective responsibility to society. The play explores the effect of class, age and sex on people's attitudes to responsibility, and shows how prejudice can prevent people from acting responsibly.
RESPONSIBILITY
The words responsible and responsibility are used by most characters in the play at some point.
Each member of the family has a different attitude to responsibility. Make sure that you know how each of them felt about their responsibility in the case of Eva Smith.
The Inspector wanted each member of the family to share the responsibility of Eva's death: he tells them, "each of you helped to kill her." However, his final speech is aimed not only at the characters on stage, but at the audience too.
CLASS
Apart from Edna the maid, the cast of the play does not include any lower class characters. We see only the rich, upwardly mobile Birlings and the upper class Gerald Croft. Yet we learn a lot about the lower class as we hear of each stage in Eva's life and we see the attitude the Birlings had for them.
SEX
Because Eva was a woman - in the days before women were valued by society and had not yet been awarded the right to vote - she was in an even worse position than a lower class man. Even upper class women had few choices. For most, the best they could hope for was to impress a rich man and marry well - which could explain why Sheila spent so long in Milwards.
For working class women, a job was crucial. There was no social security at that time, so without a job they had no money. There were very few options open to women in that situation: many saw no alternative but to turn to prostitution.
The older generation and the younger generation take the Inspector's message in different ways. While Sheila and Eric accept their part in Eva's death and feel huge guilt about it, their parents are unable to admit that they did anything wrong.
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"There is no friend
as loyal as a book."
- Ernest Hemingway
"So many books,
so little time."
- Frank Zappa
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