mr birling Flashcards
key quote
‘A man
has to look after himself’
When inspector arrives
Key quote
‘Keep labour
costs down’
sees them as a workforce and nothing more
Dehumanises them
key quote
‘lower…..
costs and higher prices’
How does mr Birling view Gerald and shelias marriage?
As a business oppotunity
key quote
‘look foward
to a time when croffs and birlings are (…) working together’
Key quote - ‘I’m talking
as a hard-headed practical man of business’
Priestley uses Birling as a symbol of the callous and heartlessness of capitalism. Through his character he is criticizing the complacency of capitalist prosperity.
Key quote - ‘you’ll hear some people
say war is Inevitable … fiddlesticks!’
Dramatic irony - His language is also very dismissive when he says ‘Fiddlesticks!’ and ‘silly’ - he belittles other’s ideas.
Exclamatory sentence - he’s passionate and convinced about what he’s saying.
Key quote - ‘The titanic….
she sails next week…and unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable.’
Titanic symbolizes his own family believes they are untouchable until the Inspector arrives giving them a rude awakening.
He is representative of the older generation who were unwilling to change.
Key quote - ‘I gather….
there’s a very good chance of a knighthood”
Key quote - ‘A man….
has to make his own way – has to look after himself – and his family too, of course”
His language changes when the Inspector arrives as he speaks in short, sharp fragments and uses lots of dashes.
However, he is presented as a realistic character by Priestley through his use of colloquial language appropriate for the time. Furthermore, he is described as ‘panic stricken’ this indicates that his defiance and bravado have finally been shattered and so Priestley lets the audience see someone who is so blindly wrong and never as really in control of events as he would like himself and others to think. Therefore the audience is invited to feel sympathy.
Key quote - ‘(rather impatiently)….
Horrid business. But I don’t understand why you should come here.”
Key quote - ‘you’d think everybody
has to look after everybody else, as if we were all mixed up like bees in a hive – community and all that nonsense.”
He often uses ‘I’ which conveys his selfish attitude, however, as the play continues he switches to the inclusive pronoun ‘we’ to diminish the scale of the problem (Eva’s death) and shift blame.
Key quote - ‘theres every….
excuse for what your mother and I did”
Key quote - ‘probably…..
a Socialist or some sort of crank”
Key quote - ‘Now look at the pair
of them- the famous younger generation who know it all. And they can’t even take a joke”
uses euphemisms when referring to taboo subjects
