Priestley Criticises the Selfishness of People Like the Birlings. What Methods Does He Use to Present This Selfishness?

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Within the extremely popular play named ‘An Inspector Calls’ Priestly uses the play to expose the lies, deceit and overall hypocrisy of people during his time. Hypocrisy is usually demonstrated by virtue of pretending to have qualities or beliefs that you do not really have. In a literal sense, weakness is the state of lacking strength. However, Priestly portrays weakness as having personal defects or failings especially in lack of moral integrity. Again, Priestly shows wickedness somewhat detached from its literal meaning and instead shows wickedness in the characters departing from the rule of divine and moral law. Priestly defines wickedness as being behaviour that is seemingly accepted by society, but nevertheless morally wrong. During Priestley’s time there existed a regime of double standards wherein the wealthy were highly respected and the poor were devalued and somehow less human than the upper classes. Priestly not only saw the selfishness in the upper classes, but also the lack of human kindness in everyone. He shows this most clearly in Arthur Birling, Sybil Birling and Eric Birling. Later on within the play Birling calls the families attention in making a speech, full of advice and warning to his young changes. Priestly uses this speech to great effect to show both Birling’s ignorance and pomposity, and also display use of dramatic irony, not only in the play, but also in the real world. Arthur believes himself to be right about everything but does not appear to realise that it his self-assuredness that leads to most of his problems, he makes a series of predictions during his speech that the audience, due to the time the play was written, knows to be untrue. Two of the main predictions Birling made were upon the Titanic and the event of a war. He goes on to talk about the Titanic an ‘absolutely unsinkable’ ship that sank on its maiden voyage.

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