From 2 Oct.

1995. Writers often highlight the values of a culture or a society by using characters who are alienated from that culture or society because of gender, race, class, or creed. Choose a novel or a play in which such a character plays a significant role and show how that character's alienation reveals the surrounding society's assumptions or moral values.

The expression "actions have consequences" is said and heard often, but rarely with the adjective "escalating" between "have" and "consequences." However, the fact that actions have intensifying, prolonged consequences is the message J.B. Priestly relays in his drama An Inspector Calls. Set in 1912, the drama follows a night of revelations for the middle-class Birling family as an Inspector questions its members about the suicide of a young, working-class woman. This woman is never seen by the audience, but her dismal life and death are revealed to be caused by the increasingly superficial actions of the Birling family, demonstrating and warning against the cold, impersonal, and status-hungry society of early twentieth century England.

Each of the four members of the Birling family had some destructive stake in this young woman's, Eva Smith's, life. Arthur Birling, a hopeful, round business man with his eye on status, fired Eva from her job at one of his mills. Throughout the play, he insists on his lack of responsibility whatsoever with Eva's demise, justifying her termination with needs to keep operating costs low. Here, Priestly means for Birling to represent unsympathetic, every-man-for-himself capitalism. Arthur's wife, Sybil, is of the same stock. She too denies having anything do with Eva's death, yet it was she who, as a member of a charity, refused to help an unmarried, pregnant Eva on her last legs. Sybil's uncharitable actions demonstrate the superficiality of that society. Positions in even well-meaning organizations are held for social status.

Mr. and Mrs. Birling's two grown children, though having inflicted Eva's life as well, provide contrast to their parents in that they feel guilt; they show evidence of having changed over the course of the night. The strongest of these two characters is Sheila. Sheila Birling had Eva fired from her job as a shopgirl out of impulsive jealousy of a pretty working-class girl. Unlike her parents, Sheila remorsefully accepts her responsibility. Moreover, as the night drags on, she encourages and fights with her unabiding parents to do the same. Perhaps with Sheila, Priestly means to show that society can change, that the provided-for classes can achieve sympathy and empathy if they only recognize the extending hand of their actions to the lower classes.

Though none of the Birlings directly wounded poor Eva, their ill-considered actions all played a part in her suicide. Through Eva and the Birlings, Priestly reveals the frigidity with which the upper classes can address those "beneath," the artificial sentiment society can have, as well as how tragic the consequences of unnoticed actions can be.