An Inspector Calls final speech?

AIC GCSE... 'What do you think is the inspector's function in the play and how does Priestley present him'?

• An Inspector Calls question. I am writing an essay, I have wrote and expanded on a few points yet I'm a bit stuck. I have said that Inspector Goole is used to interrogate the Birling's (and Gerald) about their actions. And that he is also used to move the plot forward and make the characters more developed. He also uses the inspector to voice his own opinion. Inspector Goole makes the characters confess their own actions. Inspector Goole has a grip on the topic of conversation. Inspector Goole is presented as a capitalist - referring to his last speech. PLEASE HELP ME.

• Answer:

  A mysterious interrogator who introduces himself as "Inspector Goole", claiming that he has seen the dead body of Eva/Daisy earlier that day after her slow and painful suicide by swallowing disinfectant, and that he has “a duty” to investigate the Birlings’ responsibility for her death. He makes a brief reference to a diary left by Eva/Daisy although this is never seen or explicitly referred to. Throughout the play, it is suggested that Goole knows everything about Eva/Daisy’s life and the Birlings’ involvement in her death, and is interrogating the family solely to reveal their guilt rather than to discover unknown information. Both during and after his interrogation of the family, the Birlings query whether he is actually a real inspector, and a phone call made by Arthur to the local police station reveals that there is no Inspector Goole in the local police force. Many critics and audiences have interpreted Goole’s role as an “avenging angel” or a supernatural being because of his unexplained foreknowledge of events, his prophetic final speech in which he says that humanity will learn its lesson in “fire and blood and anguish” (referring to the First World War, two years after the setting of the play 1912) and even because of his name, which plays on the word “ghoul” (meaning “ghost”). It is suggested in the final scene that Goole’s interrogation of the family will foreshadow a further interrogation to follow by the “real” police force, and that Goole’s purpose has been to warn the family in advance and encourage them to accept responsibility and repent for their bad behaviour. Goole also forces the characters to question their very own lives, and if the ones they were living were true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inspector_Calls#Inspector_Goole It has been read as a parable about the destruction of Victorian social values and the disintegration of pre-World War I English society, and Goole’s final speech has been interpreted variously as a quasi-Christian vision of hell and judgement, and as a Socialist party manifesto. The struggle between the embattled patriarch Arthur Birling and Inspector Goole has been interpreted by many critics as a symbolic confrontation between capitalism and socialism, and arguably demonstrates Priestley's Socialist political critique of the selfishness and moral hypocrisy of middle-class capitalist society. While no single member of the Birling family is solely responsible for Eva's death, together they function as a hermetic class system who exploit neglected vulnerable women, with each example of exploitation leading collectively to Eva's social exclusion, despair and suicide. The play also arguably acts as a critique of Victorian-era notions of middle-class philanthropy towards the poor, which is based on presumptions of the charity-givers' social superiority and severe moral judgement towards the "deserving poor". The romantic idea of gentlemanly chivalry towards "fallen women" is also debunked as being based on male lust and sexual exploitation of the weak by the powerful. In Goole’s final speech, Eva Smith is referred to as a representative for millions of other vulnerable working class people, and can be read as a call to action for English society to take more responsibility for working class people, pre-figuring the development of the post World War II welfare state. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inspector_Calls#Criticism_and_interpretation