An Inspector Calls - Model Essay Bank

Priestley presents responsibility as a key theme in An Inspector Calls. The older characters, Mr and Mrs Birling, refuse to accept responsibility for Eva Smith's death, while the younger generation, Sheila and Eric, do accept it. This shows that Priestley wanted the audience to see that everyone in society has a duty to look after others.

Mr Birling refuses to accept any responsibility for Eva's fate. He insists 'a man has to mind his own business and look after himself and his own', which shows that he believes only in self-interest and rejects collective duty. Priestley uses Birling to represent selfish capitalists who only care about profit. The audience would dislike Birling because he does not care about Eva at all.

Sheila, however, accepts responsibility. When she learns what she did, she says she will 'never, never do it again'. The repetition of 'never' shows that she genuinely regrets her actions and wants to change. Priestley uses Sheila to show that the younger generation can learn from their mistakes.

At the end of the play the Inspector says 'we are members of one body'. This is Priestley's message to the audience that everyone is connected and should take responsibility for each other. Priestley was a socialist and believed in a welfare state where people helped one another. He set the play in 1912 but it was first performed in 1945, so the audience could see how attitudes had changed.

Priestley uses An Inspector Calls as a vehicle to interrogate the concept of collective responsibility, contrasting characters who embrace it with those who violently reject it. The play's dramatic structure - set in 1912 but performed in 1945 - allows Priestley to weaponise dramatic irony, ensuring his post-war audience recognises the catastrophic consequences of the Birlings' individualism.

Mr Birling is presented as the embodiment of irresponsibility. His assertion that 'a man has to mind his own business and look after himself and his own' directly contradicts the Inspector's collectivist message. The blunt monosyllables and first-person focus reveal a worldview that is stubbornly self-centred. Priestley positions Birling's speeches at the play's opening so that the Inspector's arrival structurally demolishes them, brick by brick.

By contrast, Sheila's arc traces a movement from complicity to conscience. Her admission that she had the girl 'turned out' of her job is delivered with increasing anguish as the Inspector forces her to confront the human cost of her privilege. Priestley's use of the progressive tense in the stage directions - Sheila 'miserably' acknowledging her guilt - externalises an internal moral reckoning that the older Birlings never undergo.

The Inspector's parting speech functions as Priestley's thesis statement. The declarative 'we are responsible for each other' leaves no ambiguity; the plural pronoun 'we' implicates not only the Birlings but the audience themselves. Writing in 1945, Priestley knew his audience had lived through two world wars triggered, in part, by the selfishness the Birlings represent. The Inspector thus becomes Priestley's mouthpiece for a new social contract - one grounded in empathy and accountability rather than profit and status.

Priestley does not merely present responsibility in An Inspector Calls; he engineers a dramatic machine designed to manufacture it. The play's architecture - a sealed dining room, a single evening, an inescapable interrogator - strips away every escape route the Birlings attempt, forcing both characters and audience to confront a discomforting truth: that privilege is not neutral but actively destructive. Responsibility, in Priestley's schema, is not a moral option but a social obligation whose refusal carries existential consequences.

The Birlings' evasion of responsibility is dramatised through language that reveals rather than conceals. Mrs Birling's dismissal of Eva as one of the 'Girls of that class' exposes the ideological scaffolding of class: the demonstrative 'that' performs an act of distancing, converting a human being into a category. Mr Birling complements this linguistic erasure with the doctrine of self-interest - 'a man has to mind his own business and look after himself and his own' - a creed that severs the social bond Eva might have invoked for help. Priestley's distribution of these dismissive registers across the parental couple is structural rather than accidental: it reveals that their irresponsibility is not personal failure but systemic ideology, reproduced within the family unit as naturally as table manners.

Sheila's trajectory offers the counter-argument. Her initial complicity - having Eva dismissed from a shop - is framed as casual cruelty born of unchecked power. Yet Priestley grants Sheila a capacity the older Birlings lack: the ability to be remade by knowledge. Her declaration that she will 'never, never do it again' deploys repetition not as rhetoric but as vow. The adverbial intensification registers the psychological violence of self-recognition - Sheila does not simply regret; she repudiates the version of herself that was capable of such harm. Priestley structures her awakening before the interval, ensuring the audience carries her transformation into the second half as a moral benchmark against which the parents' continued denial is measured.

The Inspector's final speech crystallises Priestley's thesis, but its power derives from what it withholds as much as what it states. The warning of 'fire and blood and anguish' invokes both biblical prophecy and the lived reality of 1945 audiences who had survived the Blitz. Priestley leaves the trinitarian structure unresolved - there is no redemption clause, no offered salvation. Responsibility, in this formulation, is not transactional but unconditional: it demands action regardless of reward. The telephone call that closes the play - another inspector is coming - refuses closure entirely, denying the Birlings and the audience the comfort of finality. Priestley thus transforms the well-made play into something closer to a political act: responsibility is not a lesson to be learned once but a condition to be inhabited permanently.

Ultimately, Priestley presents responsibility as the defining moral test of a society. Those who pass it - Sheila, Eric - are reborn; those who fail - Birling, Sybil - are condemned to repeat history. Writing between the ruins of one war and the memory of another, Priestley understood that responsibility is not sentiment but infrastructure: the invisible architecture upon which any just society must be built. The Inspector, who may not be a real police officer at all, embodies this structural metaphor - he is less a character than a conscience, an apparatus of accountability that a civilised society must construct if it is to survive.

Priestley uses Sheila to show that young people can change and accept responsibility. At the start of the play, Sheila is presented as a happy young woman who is excited about her engagement to Gerald. She is described in the stage directions as being 'very pleased with life', which shows she is carefree and does not think about the world outside her family.

When the Inspector tells Sheila about Eva Smith, she is upset. She realises that she got Eva sacked from a shop because she was jealous. Sheila says she will 'never, never do it again', which shows she feels guilty and wants to make up for what she did. The repetition of 'never' shows how strongly she feels.

At the end of the play, Sheila is very different from how she was at the start. She stands up to her parents and tells them they should accept responsibility. Priestley uses Sheila to show that the younger generation can learn and improve. He was a socialist and wanted society to change after the war, so Sheila represents the hope for a better future.

Sheila Birling is not simply a character who learns a lesson; she is the instrument through which Priestley converts his audience. Her trajectory from complacent bourgeoise to anguished moral agent enacts the very transformation Priestley demands of post-war Britain: a movement from wilful ignorance to inescapable accountability. By making Sheila the first Birling to break, Priestley ensures her awakening becomes the lens through which every subsequent revelation is filtered.

At the play's opening, Sheila is confined within the dramatic shorthand of the stage directions: 'very pleased with life'. The adverbial intensifier 'very' is telling - it signals not depth of feeling but superficiality, a contentment that has never been tested. Priestley positions this description before the Inspector's entrance so that it functions retrospectively as an indictment: Sheila's pleasure is only possible because she has never been forced to see beyond the walls of the dining room. Her happiness is not innocence but anaesthesia.

The pivotal moment in Sheila's arc is not her confession but her recognition. When she admits to having Eva 'turned out' of employment, the phrasal verb is significant: it externalises guilt as a physical act of expulsion, mirroring the capitalist system's ability to dispose of individuals. Yet Sheila's response - 'I felt rotten about it at the time' - reveals that conscience was always present, merely suppressed by the social permission her class afforded. Priestley suggests that responsibility is not acquired but uncovered: it lies beneath privilege like a nerve beneath skin, waiting for the Inspector's probing to expose it.

Structurally, Priestley positions Sheila's transformation before the interval, a decision of considerable dramatic intelligence. The audience enters the break having witnessed the possibility of change, which reframes the second half: every parental evasion is now measured against the benchmark Sheila has established. Her increasingly confrontational stance toward her parents - adopting the Inspector's interrogative methods - dramatises Priestley's belief that social conscience, once awakened, is not merely personal but contagious. Sheila becomes, in effect, a secondary Inspector, proving that the apparatus of accountability can be internalised and reproduced.

Priestley's final stroke is to deny Sheila a conventional resolution. Unlike her parents, who retreat into the relief of discovering the Inspector may be a fraud, Sheila insists that the reality of their actions remains unchanged. Her refusal to accept the comfortable explanation represents Priestley's most radical proposition: that moral responsibility does not depend on external verification. For a 1945 audience rebuilding a society from rubble, Sheila embodies the conviction that conscience must be self-sustaining - not imposed by inspectors or enforced by institutions, but held as an act of permanent, voluntary vigilance.