Birling workers inspector figure duty mr quickly eva

Text	The Inspector and Mr Birling It is quickly revealed by the Inspector that Eva Smith once worked in Mr Birling’s factory and that he fired her. However, as this happened over two years before the evening of her suicide Birling refuses to accept any responsibility: ‘I can’t accept any responsibility. If we were all responsible for everything that happened to everybody we’d had anything to do with, it would be very awkward, wouldn’t it?’. It is exactly this abdication of responsibility that Priestley seeks to undermine and by articulating it through Birling, a character already established as a figure of ridicule, he is, by extension, able to make the critique all the more effective. Birling then concedes that the reason he fired Eva was because she asked for a raise to which his justification is: it’s my duty to keep labour costs down’ and then also ‘If you don’t come down sharply on some of these people, they’d soon be asking the earth’. The lexical choice of ‘duty’ highlights the disparity between what Birling thinks his responsibility is and what the Inspector thinks it ought to be: for Birling his own concern is his pocket and not workers such as Eva. Furthermore, to a post-war audience, ‘duty’ would have had connotations of war (‘do your duty’) and as such Birling’s comments would have seemed even more trivial and as such further heightened the distance between him and the audience. It would have been particularly galling for an audience that may well have lost loved ones, even fought in the war themselves, to hear the concept of ‘duty’ being repurposed to include lining one’s own pockets. If Birling starting the play as a figure to lampoon with his misguided comments about the Titanic, he is quickly becoming a figure of loathing One might also consider the lexical choice of ‘these people’ when referring to Eva: this dehumanises his workers by lumping them all together and as such demonstrates the entrenched prejudice that upper class had for lower class. Birling does not see his workers as individuals with emotions and personal problems, but as tools that can do his bidding. The Inspector, indeed the play as a whole, seeks to provide a platform for those workers otherwise denied representation.

Text

The Inspector and Mr Birling

It is quickly revealed by the Inspector that Eva Smith once worked in Mr Birling’s factory and that he fired her.
However, as this happened over two years before the evening of her suicide Birling refuses to accept any responsibility: ‘I can’t accept any responsibility. If we were all responsible for everything that happened to everybody we’d had anything to do with, it would be very awkward, wouldn’t it?’.
It is exactly this abdication of responsibility that Priestley seeks to undermine and by articulating it through Birling, a character already established as a figure of ridicule, he is, by extension, able to make the critique all the more effective.
Birling then concedes that the reason he fired Eva was because she asked for a raise to which his justification is: it’s my duty to keep labour costs down’ and then also ‘If you don’t come down sharply on some of these people, they’d soon be asking the earth’.
The lexical choice of ‘duty’ highlights the disparity between what Birling thinks his responsibility is and what the Inspector thinks it ought to be: for Birling his own concern is his pocket and not workers such as Eva.
Furthermore, to a post-war audience, ‘duty’ would have had connotations of war (‘do your duty’) and as such Birling’s comments would have seemed even more trivial and as such further heightened the distance between him and the audience.
It would have been particularly galling for an audience that may well have lost loved ones, even fought in the war themselves, to hear the concept of ‘duty’ being repurposed to include lining one’s own pockets. If Birling starting the play as a figure to lampoon with his misguided comments about the Titanic, he is quickly becoming a figure of loathing
One might also consider the lexical choice of ‘these people’ when referring to Eva: this dehumanises his workers by lumping them all together and as such demonstrates the entrenched prejudice that upper class had for lower class.
Birling does not see his workers as individuals with emotions and personal problems, but as tools that can do his bidding.
The Inspector, indeed the play as a whole, seeks to provide a platform for those workers otherwise denied representation.

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