Inspector Goole: Character Analysis for An Inspector Calls

How the Inspector is presented

• From the moment he arrives the Inspector takes control of the Birlings' home. Priestley's stage direction says he "need not be a big man" but "creates at once an impression of massiveness, solidity, and purposefulness", so his authority comes from presence, not size.
• Priestley gives him "a disconcerting habit of looking hard at the person he addresses before actually speaking", so he unsettles each character before a word is spoken.
• He refuses Birling's offer of port with "I'm on duty", a detail that sets him at a moral distance from the family's comfort and wealth.
• He cannot be hurried or talked over. When Birling tries to pull rank he cuts in "massively" and keeps command of the stage throughout.
• His tone is moral rather than procedural. He confronts the family with what they did far more than he gathers evidence, behaving more like a judge than a policeman.
• He controls information tightly, working "one person and one line of inquiry at a time" and showing the photograph to only one character at once, so no one can rehearse a story.

What the Inspector stands for

• He is usually read as Priestley's mouthpiece, the voice of the socialist argument that runs against everything Birling believes. Birling himself dismisses him as "probably a Socialist or some sort of crank".
• The Inspector is Birling's dramatic foil: against Birling's view that "a man has to mind his own business and look after his own", he argues the opposite, that people are bound together and answerable to one another.
• His final speech states the play's central message directly:

"We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other."

• He warns that if people refuse this lesson, "they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish". Written in 1945, the line points the audience toward the two world wars the 1912 characters cannot foresee.
• He speaks for the powerless, above all Eva Smith, forcing the comfortable Birlings to face the human cost of how they treat those beneath them.
• Through him Priestley presses his 1945 audience, who would soon be voting on the welfare state, to choose collective responsibility over the self-interest of 1912.

How the Inspector is built into the play's structure

• His entrance is timed precisely: the doorbell rings mid-sentence, just as Birling insists "a man has to mind his own business", so his arrival undercuts that selfishness before he has even appeared.
• He works as a dramatic device, or catalyst: he drives the plot like a morality play, bringing each guilty character to confess in turn so that every admission builds on the last and the evening tightens steadily towards Eric.
• He splits the family along the line the play cares about most: the young, Sheila and Eric, accept their guilt and change, while the older Birlings and Gerald refuse to and look for a way out.
• Sheila sees through his method first, recognising his apparent omniscience and warning the others it is useless to hide because "we hardly ever told him anything he didn't know".
• After he leaves, the family unpicks him: Gerald learns from a police sergeant that no Inspector Goole exists, and a call to the infirmary confirms no girl has died.
• His name sounds like "ghoul" and he has no first name, leaving open whether he is a real man, a ghost, the family's conscience, or something stranger.

The play's cyclical structure then resets it

The telephone rings to announce that a girl has just died and a real inspector is on his way. The whole evening is poised to begin again, and the doubt becomes each character's test.