The role of Inspector Goole is in some ways very simple to analyse: he is used to present
the Birling family and Gerlad with the message of social responsibility.
However, what is so clever is the variety of techniques and methods Priestley use to
present the message through this character, and that’s what we’ll look at in this
video.
The first of these techniques is Priestley’s inversion of generic expectations.
‘An Inspector Calls’ is a work of detective fiction, and Inspector Goole is the intelligent
detective who will solve the case.
However, whilst a traditional detective story focuses on the narrowing down from a list
of numerous suspects to just one, Inspector Goole does the opposite and shows that not
one but all are responsible for the death of Eva Smith or, as he puts it to the Birling
family shortly before his exit,
‘each of you helped to kill her’.
Priestley inverts the generic expectations of detective fiction to present the key message
that ‘We are members of one body.
We are responsible for each other’.
As Maggie B Gale puts it, Priestley ‘wanted a social and political shift which took Britain
forward to a society based on equality and community after the Second World War.’
This sense of equality and community is seen not just through the message of joint responsibility
of the inverted detective genre, but also through sentence structure.
Shortly after his arrival on stage in Act One, Inspector Goole tells Mr Birling:
Because what happened to her then may have determined what happened to her afterwards,
and what happened to her afterwards may have driven her to suicide.
Here we see an example of anadiplosis, where the second clause in the sentence begins by
repeating the last words of the previous clause.
As my good friend Tom Briars-Delve points out:
Soon after his entrance, the audience start to realise that the inspector’s investigation
focuses on the surprising links between different events and people.
The inspector initiates this idea of connections through anadiplosis; by repeating ‘what
happened to her afterwards’ at the end of one clause and the beginning of the next,
the sentence structure itself cleverly emphasises how the content of these statements is inextricably
connected and leads on from one another.
So, what we have is the inversion of the expected generic conventions of the detective genre,
coupled with the use of anadiplosis, to hammer home the point that everyone’s actions are
interconnected, and all are responsible for the death of Eva Smith.
And what about the inspector himself?
Priestley deliberately portrays the Inspector as a mysterious character.
For a playwright who goes into great detail in some stage directions (for example, the
opening page of the play is almost entirely made up of stage direction), Priestley tells
us very little about Inspector Goole.
Even Goole’s dialogue reveals often what he is not, rather than what he is: ‘I don’t
play golf’ and ‘I never take offence’.
This vagueness of character is deliberate on the part of Priestley, as it creates a
sense of ambiguity and mystery.
This is added to by the character’s name.
It is often noted that the inspector’s name, ‘Goole’ sounds like the word ‘ghoul’,
meaning ghost or spirit, and it is true that the inspector does haunt Gerald and the Birlings
about their role in Eva’s death.
It’s also true that the inspector at times seems to know too much about a girl who died
two hours ago, even though he has read her letter and ‘sort of diary’.
This has led some to wonder whether the inspector is some kind of supernatural being.
There is no definitive answer either way about whether the inspector is who he says he is:
he might be an imposter or a supernatural being.
But one thing is clear: descriptions are deliberately vague and ambiguous.
So why is this?
Well, the vague and ambiguous depictions of the character help us focus less on the character
himself and more on the message he brings.
And that message is loudly declared with no subtlety whatsoever.
With most of Inspector Goole’s dialogue, Priestley uses questions: he interrogates
the characters on stage, which is exactly what we would expect from a detective investigating
a crime.
However, there are a number of moments when Goole delivers lines of dialogue that seem
to come directly from the mouth of Priestley, hammering home the message of social responsibility
that he wants the audience to learn.
Priestley uses the character of Inspector Goole to speaks directly to the audience about
social responsibility, and it’s not at all subtle.
In fact, this lack of subtlety led Sewell Stoke, in his 1947 ‘Theatre Arts’ article
‘‘Panache and Port Wine’ to write: ‘Then the bell rings and in comes Inspector Goole
(Inspector Priestley, to be more exact)’.
Yes, the character of Inspector Goole does seem to be the embodiment of JB Priestley
himself – a mouthpiece used to deliver the key message that Priestley wants the audience
to take home with them.
Priestley enhances his message through his use of supernatural imagery in the inspector’s
final words about, ‘fire and blood and anguish’.
This is an allusion to the Biblical description of hell as being a ‘blazing furnace, where
there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’ (Matthew 13:42).
However, Priestley’s point here cannot accurately be labelled as Biblical.
His message seems to be that people need to do good deeds to make their way into heaven,
and those who don’t, will end up in hell.
This is a moralistic concept which is not found in the Bible, but either way, the Biblical
language adds to the supernatural, other-worldly aspect of Inspector Goole, which helps us
to so clearly remember his message.