Act 1: - How does Priestley create a sense of unease and suggest that Mr Birling’s optimism is unfounded?

As Act 1 of An Inspector Calls continues we see that Arthur Birling seems to be a confident and powerful man who is clearly anxious to be seen as a successful businessman and the head of his family. He is apparently very pleased with the way life is turning out for him and the other Birlings.

Priestley sets the play in 1912 but it was first performed in 1945. He quite deliberately proceeds to make Mr Birling speak, in these first scenes of An Inspector Calls of events which the audience would know all about. A lot of what he dismisses as ‘wild talk’ and ‘nonsense’ actually happened. This gives Birling the appearance of foolishness and over-confidence as well as creating a sense of unease as the reader loses confidence and trust in Birling’s word. The writer has used dramatic irony to make Birling’s current position look very unstable. The first example of this is when he talks about the chance of further labour strikes. He states that “just because the miners came on strike, there’s a lot of wild talk about possible labour trouble in the near future. Don’t worry. We’ve passed the worst of it.” However there were many strikes in between 1912 and 1945 including the general strike in 1926. As this strike resulted in the country coming to a halt for nine days the fact that Birling is so complacent about this matter shows the audience how overconfident and misguided he is. This leads to the audience thinking that his misjudgment of situations could lead to something with deep implications to the seemingly happy Birling family thus creating a sense of unease.

Eric goes on to ask his father “What about war?” Birling dismisses this immediately saying “The Germans don’t want war. Nobody wants war”. An Inspector Calls was written a year after the end of the Second World War therefore two terrible World Wars had devastated Europe and other parts of the world by the time audiences would have heard him say this. The blind optimism shown here by Birling results in even stronger dramatic irony. As this is such a major misjudgment by Birling the sense that something in his life is about to go wrong without him foreseeing it, is further increased.

Another example of Priestley’s use of dramatic irony to create a sense of unease is the reference to the Titanic. Birling uses the ship as an example of man’s great technological advances. He specifically says that it is “absolutely unsinkable” and reels of it’s qualities and statistics, saying “That’s what you’ve got to keep your eye on, facts like that’ not the words of ‘scaremongers.’ This shows the audience that Birling has an arrogant side to him, one that may result in problems for him and those close to him further into the play. This example of his over optimistic outlook, yet again, builds a sense of unease in the scene as well as in the audience’s view of the family’s prospects.

Birling’s optimism is founded on his success and wealth; he does repeatedly stress how hard he has worked and how experienced in business he is. It is however, his anxiety about his social status that underpins this pompous optimism and dismissal of problems. He is very presumptuous. This is shown when he makes it clear to Gerald that he believes that he will receive a knighthood however he can only base this belief on “a hint or two” and “I was Lord Mayor here a year or two ago when royalty visited us.” He bases his beliefs on what he thinks others think of him, which is very presumptuous and cocky as he says “And I’ve always been regarded as a sound useful man”. This creates a further sense of unease as it points towards his slight arrogance. The audience at this point will start to see him as clearly heading towards a fall or that he is at least blind to some pressing issue that needs to be resolved. Priestley emphasises this by Birling saying “so long as we behave ourselves, don’t get into police court or start a scandal.” It is made clear something is going to happen.

By repeatedly using dramatic irony through a number of different examples in a short period of time in the play An Inspector Calls, Priestley builds a sense of unease in the audience. The words of Mr Birling give the impression that something unforeseen by him will occur and it will affect him and those close to him greatly. His anxiety about his success and status not quite being good enough for people such as Gerald’s mother, suggest that he will be disgraced as well as financially ruined.