Themes

Question 1

What are some of the themes in An Inspector Calls?

Answer 1

• Age
• Responsibility
• Class
• Social vs Capitalism

Question 2

How is the theme of responsibility portrayed in An Inspector Calls?

Answer 2

• Each member of the family has a different attitude to responsibility.
• 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.

Question 3

How is the theme of age portrayed in An Inspector Calls?

Answer 3

• 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.

Question 4

What is the difference between the old and young generation?
[Old generation]

Answer 4

Old:

• The old are set in their ways. They are utterly confident that they are right and they see the young as foolish.
• The old will do anything to protect themselves: Mrs Birling lies to the Inspector when he first shows her the photograph; Mr Birling wants to cover up a potential scandal.
• Mr and Mrs Birling have much to fear from the visit of the ‘real’ inspector because they know they will lose everything.

Question 5

What is the difference between the old and young generation?
[Young generation]

Answer 5

Young:

• The young are open to new ideas. This is first seen early in Act 1 when both Eric and Sheila express sympathy for the strikers - an idea which horrifies Birling, who can only think of production costs and ignores the human side of the issue.
• The young are honest and admit their faults. Eric refuses to try to cover his part up, saying, “the fact remains that I did what I did.”
• Sheila and Eric have nothing to fear from the visit of the ‘real’ inspector because they have already admitted what they have done wrong, and will change.

Question 6

How is the theme of class portrayed in An Inspector Calls?

Answer 6

• 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.
  -The Palace Variety Theatre was a music hall. It was not seen as quite ‘respectable’ entertainment - probably not somewhere where Sheila would have gone. The stalls bar of the Palace Variety Theatre, where Eva Smith met both Gerald and Eric, was the bar for the lower classes and a favourite haunt of prostitutes. We could ask what Gerald and Eric were there in the first place! Alderman Meggarty, a local dignitary, also went there a lot.
  Priestley is trying to show that the upper classes are unaware that the easy lives they lead rest upon hard work of the lower classes.