Responsibility (the central theme)

Priestley opens the play by ensuring the audience hears the ideology he intends to dismantle. Mr Birling's pre-Inspector monologue insists that 'a man has to mind his own business and look after himself and his own', a creed of self-enclosed responsibility that limits ethical concern to the immediate family. Priestley's choice to give Birling repeated dramatic ironies - about the unsinkable Titanic and impossible war - discredits him before his ideology has finished forming. The audience is therefore taught from the outset that the older capitalist conception of responsibility is intellectually as well as morally bankrupt, preparing them to accept the alternative the Inspector will introduce.

The Inspector reframes responsibility as a chain rather than a private virtue. By questioning the family 'one person and one line of inquiry at a time', he demonstrates that each individual act of irresponsibility - Birling's sacking, Sheila's complaint, Gerald's affair, Sybil's refusal of charity, Eric's exploitation - combines into Eva's death. Priestley's structural choice to make the interrogations sequential rather than simultaneous embodies the argument: responsibility is not divisible into discrete personal pockets but accumulates into shared social consequence. The dramaturgy itself teaches the audience how guilt actually works in a society.

Priestley uses Sybil to expose how class allows the wealthy to outsource responsibility. Her dismissal of Eva and others as 'girls of that class' uses the deictic 'that' to construct distance, verbally pushing the working class outside her ethical horizon. Her refusal of help to a pregnant young woman, justified by the claim that she 'used the name Birling', is dramatic irony so brutal it becomes structural punishment: her own class snobbery condemns her son. Priestley engineers this moment to demonstrate that capitalist responsibility, restricted to one's own kind, will always eventually devour even those it claims to protect.