An Inspector Calls Collective Responsibility Essay

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When people do wrong, they must then explain, to themselves and others, the wrongness of their actions.

Sheila is the most willing to see that she has erred, in having Eva/Daisy removed from her job at Milward’s.

Arthur is more concerned with the family’s good name, and Sybil believes that in denying Eva/Daisy charity, she did what any person in her position should have done.

Eric feels some version of Sheila’s guilt, but his drunkenness shades his emotions somewhat.

Sheila regrets to hear that the person she incriminated was none other than Eva Smith, and that she and Arthur are responsible, in part, for Eva’s poverty and suicide.

The Inspector turns to Gerald and asks if he knows someone named Daisy Renton.The Inspector implies that if men and women continue to behave callously to one another in the industrialized countries of the West, then those countries, as entities, will “commit suicide.” That is, the Inspector’s warning to the Birlings foreshadows the cataclysms of the World Wars One and Two, which the audience in 1946 would understand to follow quickly upon the events of the play.Throughout his questioning, the Inspector takes on the role of a professor or guide.When Sheila returns to the room, the Inspector begins interrogating her.It is revealed that Sheila got a girl fired from Milward’s, a local shop, for giving Sheila mean looks as she was trying on clothing.But if, the playwright implies, the dead person at the close of the play is the same person with whom each character has interacted, then their guilt is no longer individual, but instead collective, although only Sheila seems to understand this fully.Priestley leaves this question open as the play ends.Arthur says he is not sorry for doing so, even though he is sad to hear of the girl’s death.Arthur believes that his foremost obligation is to his profits.His “inspection,” as Sheila realizes in Act Three, is designed to encourage them to interrogate themselves, to consider when in their lives they have behaved immorally, and how they might improve as family members, friends, and citizens.An Inspector Calls is a play in three acts, set in Brumley, an English manufacturing town, in 1912.