An Inspector Calls
J.B. PRIESTLEY Who is to blame? The play has seven characters and is set in 1912. The whole play is conducted from the Berlings dining room that is in an industrial city called Brumly in the North Midlands. The play opens with the Berling family celebrating Shella's engagement to Gerald Croft who is also at the party. We see that Gerald and the Berlings are fairly wealthy because they can afford to have a party unlike most people at that time. On page 11 the Inspector is introduced and commences to tell the Berlings that "two hours ago a young woman died in the Infirmary" . The young woman was dead because she had drunk some bleach. Suicide was suspected. Her name was Eva Smith. He starts his investigation by questioning Mr Berling and slowly works his way through the family, including Gerald.
Mr Berling is the first person the Inspector confronts with the responsibility of the young women^s death. Mr Berling is the type of character that thinks that Titanic is unsinkable and that there will never be a war which is a dramatic irony. Eva had been employed at Mr Berlings factory but had been sacked for leading a strike to get the workers more pay. At first Mr Berling will not accept responsibility which is shown when he says "Still, I can't accept any responsibility. If we were all responsible for everything that happened to everybody we'd had anything to do with, it would be very awkward." Mr Burling shows in this way, that he has a lot of power to say if the workers have a steady income or not and does not care about the consequences. The Inspector thinks that Mr Berling is partly to blame for Eva being so depressed that she killed herself. ^She was out of work for the next two months. Both her parents were dead, so that she^d no home to go back to. And she hadn^t been able to save much out of what Berling and Company had paid her. So that after two months, with no work, no money coming in, and living in lodgings,...
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