An Inspector Calls flashcards

Key points

• Open with a thesis: Priestley uses the Inspector to argue for collective responsibility.
• The Inspector is Priestley's mouthpiece: he says what Priestley wants the audience to hear.
• Write "Priestley presents Mr Birling as…": each character is built to carry an idea.
• One sustained argument beats five separate observations.

Key points

• His power comes from how he carries himself, so he takes control of the room.
• Goole sounds like ghoul, a spirit of the dead: Eva's death has come to haunt the family.
• Like the judge in a morality play, he exposes each Birling's sin in turn.

Key points

• The soft light shows the Birlings' cosy view of themselves; the harder light shows they will be exposed.
• Stage directions tell the audience how to read a character before they speak.

Key points

• Dramatic irony: the audience knows what a character does not.
• Birling is wrong about the Titanic and war, so we doubt him on responsibility too.
• Mrs Birling blames the baby's father without knowing it is Eric, so she condemns her own son.

Key points

• All the action is in one dining room, in continuous time: nobody can escape the questions.
• Each act ends on a cliffhanger, such as Eric's return at the end of Act 2.
• The final phone call says a girl has died and an inspector is coming: it begins again.
• This cyclical structure suggests the lesson returns until people learn it.

Key points

• Mr Birling sacks her for leading a strike for higher wages.
• Sheila has her sacked from Milwards out of jealousy.
• Gerald keeps her as his mistress, as Daisy Renton, then ends it.
• Eric gets her pregnant and steals money from his father's office to support her.
• Mrs Birling persuades her charity committee to refuse Eva help.

Key points

• He believes in profit and self-interest, and rejects any duty to others.
• He cares most about status, so a scandal worries him more than Eva's death.
• He refuses responsibility from start to finish: he never changes.

Key points

• She sees the workers as people early on, then accepts her part in Eva's death.
• By the end she speaks with something of the Inspector's voice: Priestley's hope for the young.

Key points

• She turns Eva away partly because Eva called herself "Mrs Birling".
• She chairs a charity, yet chooses prejudice over help.
• Even after the whole story she will not change, and sides with her husband.

Key points

• Sheila and Eric accept their responsibility and are changed.
• Mr and Mrs Birling are simply relieved when the Inspector seems a hoax.
• Gerald sides with the parents and wants to carry on as before.

Key points

• Set in 1912, just before the Titanic sank and the First World War began.
• Written in 1945, as the Second World War ended, for audiences who had lived through both wars.
• The audience knows what Birling cannot see coming, so his confident views are discredited.

Key points

• Priestley was a socialist: society shares responsibility for its poorest members.
• 1912's rigid class system lets the Birlings treat Eva as beneath them.
• In 1945 voters elected a Labour government that went on to build the welfare state.

Key points

• Slide a few words into your own sentence rather than copying out a speech.
• Pick quotations with a single word to analyse, such as Birling's "nonsense".
• Short quotations are far easier to remember in a closed-book exam.

A quotation woven in