Eva died two hours before the inspector came. She died because she drank a lot of “strong disinfectant” which burnt her “inside out”. Inspector Goole goes to the Birling’s house to confront each one of them and place responsibility on them. Though the inspector does not tell us it, it is quite obvious that he is there not to find the “main culprit” but instead he is there to make the Birling’s see through somebodies eyes of the Lower “class” and feel some “responsibility”. Each and every one of them, Mr Birling, Sheila, Gerald, Mrs Birling and Eric, all played a part in Eva’s death and the inspector wants them to realise this and accept responsibility.…
If I were to blame one person in particularly I would blame Eric as he got Eva pregnant and left her in a state beyond recovery. Although he offered her money to live, Eva did not except the money. This is because she had reasons to believe that the money was stolen. We later found out that the money was indeed stolen from his dads work. This isn’t the only thing that Eric’s parents find out about him. They also discover that he is an alcoholic and has been drinking heavily for a while. It was this drinking that lead to Eva getting pregnant and ultimately causing her to commit a brutal suicide. Despite all this I have a feeling that there is something the inspector is hiding, I think that he is trying to stir things up in the Birling family. I find it interesting to note that he choosing to visit them on the day that Sheila and ___________ are to celebrate their engagement. It is also interesting that his name “Goole” implies ghosts and monsters. This could have something to do with the death of Eva Smith. So in conclusion I don’t think that individually the Birling family have a lot of input towards Eva’s death but as a group they ultimately caused…
If we look at Eric as a character, we should be able to associate him with a certain conscience, which, when you think about it, is what the Inspector tried to do; get the characters to appeal to their conscience. Now Eric, along with Sheila, both give real, emotional responses to the death of Eva/Daisy, whereas Gerald and Mr/Mrs Birling didn't. Talk about that; surely as responsible, wealthy adults, they should be the mature ones, accepting responsibility and taking the blame. Yet it took the youngest child to accept fault.…
Priestly creates mood and atmosphere when the inspector mentions why Eva came to Mrs Birling’s charity organisation for help. “It was because she was going to have a child that she went for assistance to your mother’s committee”. This creates this mood because the audience might think that Gerald is the father.…
At the end of the play, it is clear that Sheila has matured and take more authority from away from her parents. When the family learns that the Inspector wasn’t isn’t real Sheila says to her parents ‘You knew it them. You began to learn something. And now you’ve stopped.’ Priestley’s use of tripling highlights Sheila’s strong desire for change and her determination to persuade her parents to change their ideologies and spread the Inspector’s views. Furthermore, the use of the personal pronoun ‘you’ demonstrates how Sheila evidently distances herself away from her parents, insinuating her desire for a lack of association with them. She realises she doesn’t want to be influenced by their views as she knows they are wrong, therefore highlighting the contrast between Sheila and her parent’s attitudes as well as Priestley’s desire for the younger generation to understand what is wrong and actively change to make it…
To begin with Eric isn’t very mature or well established in the ranks of the family. Both of the children are treated as kids even though they are in their 20’s ‘She makes fun of him and Birling cuts him off before he can finish speaking/delivering his speech’. Thus showing Birling’s little respect or opinion of his son. The first we hear about him in the play ‘Eric suddenly guffaws’ he is then unable to explain his laughter and is somewhat nervous about something ‘I don’t know really-suddenly I felt I just had to laugh’. The moment itself wasn’t an amusing one, but this just gives me a picture of a young child sniggering to themselves in a corner, then realising they have done wrong and then persisting to be quite This first line is significant because it builds him up as a character and J B Priestley has cleverly thought of Eric’s opening line. This then impacts the reader by showing them immediately that he is treated like a boy so then acts like a boy. Priestley’s use of dialogue helps to portray Eric as a character of foolishness and…
The inspector's methods of investigation are to create a tension by telling the family that "a young woman has just died at the infirmary." After this it is much easier to get information from them. Priestley tries to make the characters seem very irresponsible because he sees them as stuck up, higher-middle class folk who only care about themselves and how they look to other families.…
As soon as they meet in act one, Birling attempts to show his social superiority to the Inspector, boasting about his contacts in the police force, this shows Birlings character and the type of person he is, big headed and boastfull. Within the play Mr and Mrs Birling seems to be the only characters that are unable to accept the fact that they helped in the death of eva smith. In contrast to Mr and Mrs Birling Sheila has total opposite views and realises what she did was wrong, and wishes that she could go back and never get Eva sacked-…
‘An Inspector Calls’ is a play set in1912. However it was written by J.B Priestley in 1945 and set in Brumley. As he lived through both wars he could see what had actually happened in the time the play was set. J.B Priestley uses the characters to express his views on the issue of social responsibility, morality and about class divisions with many themes including greed, regret, guilt and blame.…
She shows perception in her attitude towards him, realising that he already knows much of what he is asking them and showing intuition about what his questioning is leading to. She is also very perceptive of Gerald - for example we hear at she has had suspicions about him when she mentions "last summer, when you never came near me” and immediately realises that he knew Daisy Renton from his reaction when the Inspector mentioned her name. Indeed, at the end of the Act One, she seems to be the only character that can pick up on the part Gerald played in Eva Smith’s death. Furthermore, Sheila is intuitive, as she knows Eric drinks a lot. By the end of Act One we see that she is not as shallow and naive as we may have first imagined her to…
After Mr Birling, the next character the Inspector questions is Sheila. Although Sheila is a young girl, she is of a high class, so she does therefore have some power. She too abuses her power and orders to have Eva Smith fired from her job when shopping because Sheila thought Eva was laughing at her. She says ‘If she was a pathetic looking…
The Second Industrial Revolution took place between 1870 and 1914. Urbanization and territories that were being expanded fueled the Second Industrial Revolution. Transportation, factory production, and various other industries caused the United States be a producer of one-third of the world’s industrial services output. Many inventions from these industries were interconnected because of the technologies in the Second Industrial Revolution. The revolution effected the world by these new or improved technologies.…
Arguably, Priestley uses Sheila Birling as a vehicle to explore a diverse range of ideas, from the issue of gender roles and stereotypes through the idea of socialism and the need of shared responsibility with which Priestley himself occupied. Sheila can be seen as a representation of people changing their attitude and approaches through mistakes. Priestley seems to use her to encourage people to change and not to stepping back into the period before the world war happened where people only cares about themselves and ignores social responsibility. The ways in which Sheila accepts responsibility and urges the other characters int the play change their way and learn from their experiences with the inspector can be sen as a message behind from Priestley to the audience not to let the lessons learnt from the second world war be forgotten.…
Responsibility: the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something or having control of someone.…
What is responsibility? - A duty or obligation to satisfactorily perform or complete a task (assigned by someone, or created by one's own promise or circumstances) that one must fulfill, and which has a consequent penalty for failure.…