Grade 9 Essay: An Inspector Calls and Significance of the Inspector
Sarah O'Rourke - Mar 24, 2026
Read the real student essay that scored 30/30 for IGCSE English Literature (Edexcel 4ET1).
Video lesson
What is the significance of the Inspector in An Inspector Calls?
Written by Rachel C – shared with permission.
An Inspector Calls is a morality play written by J.B. Priestley in 1945 after World War II upset the previously strict socioeconomic hierarchy between capitalist and working class in Britain. The character of Inspector Goole is a proxy for Priestley to espouse his socialist and pacifist views, functioning both as an inspector within the play and a meta-inspector for the audience watching. This is best exemplified through the stage directions at the play’s opening, his parallels to the Judeo-Christian God and the Bible, and Priestley’s anti-war intentions in writing him this way.
The Inspector is immediately presented as a powerful and disruptive figure. Having begun the story in media res, Priestley interrupts it with a “sharp ring of the doorbell”, signalling Inspector Goole’s arrival. From the beginning, Inspector Goole interrupts Mr. Birling’s speech and he does so violently, as the adjective “sharp” connotes. Additionally, his very appearance is able to change the lighting of the room from “pink and intimate” to “brighter and harder”. The adjectives “pink” and “intimate” connote warm and comfort, while the comparative adjective “harder” suggests harshness. “Brighter” light exposes more flaws in the Birlings but carries connotations of improvement and promise for a better future, which the Inspector seeks to create through socialism. “Sharp”, “harder”, “brighter”, and later “cutting in” also create a semantic field of forceful disruption, showing that from the introduction of his character he “[cuts]” into the Birlings’ ideology. Additionally, he quite literally lets there be light, as the Judeo-Christian God does at the beginning of the Bible.
There are further parallels between the Inspector and God. He replaces God as the figure of judgement in traditional morality plays, acting as a moral rather than legal policeman – he does not seek to convict the Birlings of a crime but for them to realise their lack of ethical principle. He is resistant to corruption, refusing alcohol because “[he is] on duty”. In the play, the symbol of alcohol represents immorality – all the men save the Inspector drink constantly, with the drunkard Alderman Meggarty and Eric’s inebriated assault of Eva Smith being the most morally reprehensible examples – so the Inspector’s staunch sobriety shows his moral purity, especially when compared to the Birlings. He also later proclaims that “[they] are members of one body; the noun “body” implies that social classes are inextricably connected, as how the limbs and organs of a creature cannot survive independently of the larger whole. This echoes the Christian Holy Communion and would have made Priestley’s socialist messaging more convincing to a majority Christian audience: even the most fervently anti-socialist Britishman would have agreed with the Holy Communion, and so by borrowing religious words, Priestley implies that a Christian society must also be a socialist society.
However, another of Priestley’s motives other than promoting socialism was warning against war. The structure of the play is a microcosm of the two World Wars, with the Inspector’s arrival representing WWI and Eva’s ‘second death’, as well as the inspector who calls after the end of the play, representing WWII. One could view the Inspector’s character appearing as a direct result of Birling ridiculing “community and all that nonsense”, showing how a capitalist Britain directly led to WWI. Before he leaves, Inspector Goole warns the characters that there will be “fire and blood and anguish” if they do not change. The use of polysyndeton lengthens the sentence and highlights each individual term, emphasising further his message; the nouns themselves suggest hell, described in the Bible as a “blazing furnace”, as well as war. The period after the Inspector leaves is the period between the wars, when society had the chance and ability to change but did not, as symbolised by Mr. Birling and Gerald concluding at first opportunity that it was all a “[hoax]”. Even the use of the noun “hoax” implies fraud for money or otherwise something to be gained by the Inspector, grounding his actions in Mr. Birling’s avaricious worldview and indicating Mr. Birling’s inability to even comprehend the failings of his ideology or the desire to be cognisant of social responsibility, forcing him to view others’ altruistic actions through the same lens. This exemplifies how even after the trauma of a war, the capitalist classes were unable to change for the better, leading to WWII.
Priestley therefore implies that the audience directly caused the war. The Birlings are, in some ways, a proxy for the contemporary audience in the sense that the Inspector and Priestley respectively are convincing them to change their ways. Within the narrative, the Birlings directly decide Eva Smith’s fate. Up until the ‘second death’, it can be said that Eva exists in a liminal state between existence and metaphor by the Inspector, like the concept of Schrödinger’s Cat in quantum mechanics: she is neither alive nor dead until observed or in this case, until the Birlings come to a conclusion on her story’s plausibility, causing the phone call and news of her real death to come. This event is utterly ironic – the Birlings’ decision that she did not die caused her to die. The implication is that the contemporary audience, after experiencing WWII, was completely in control of whether further “fire and blood and anguish” would befall, with the ‘second death’ no longer being a strict analogy for WWII in the meta-narrative but representing all future conflicts that the newly socially conscious audience would be able to avoid.
Thus, the character of the Inspector functions not only as an inspector for Eva Smith’s death but an inspector for society at large and for the contemporary audience watching. Within the play, the Inspector disrupts the ideologies of the Birlings, and outside of the play, the goal is for him to do the same for the audience. Priestley depicts Mr. Birling as illogically stubborn, an archetype for the audience to avoid becoming, and the younger characters as open-minded and willing to change, traits that the audience should seek to emulate. His broader goal is to mitigate further “fire and blood and anguish” by creating a more responsible Britain.
