An Inspector Calls by John Boynton Priestley
Published 1992 · 104 pages · Drama, Mystery & Crime
How hard is An Inspector Calls to read?
An Inspector Calls scores 38 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 28 out of 100
- Priestley writes plain Edwardian-era speech for the stage, with little archaic or technical diction. Its register is clearer than The Great Gatsby and closer to Beach Read in accessibility.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Dialogue dominates, in short exchanges and stage directions. Birling's speeches run a little longer, but nothing approaches the nesting of Gatsby's prose.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- The moral argument about shared responsibility is delivered through concrete events: a dismissal, a shop quarrel, an affair. The ideas are clear and grounded in one room, more so than in The Remains of the Day.
- Information density: 35 out of 100
- A single evening, a single set, and a small cast of seven keep the load light. Each confession adds one new fact, so the reveals stay manageable, like the plot-driven pace of The Housemaid.
- Narrative indirection: 38 out of 100
- The Inspector states his moral outright, and the family's guilt is spelled out in confessions. Only the identity of Goole and the final phone call ask the audience to infer.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- The Inspector's name, the telephone, and the 1912 date carry meaning, and Eva Smith stands for the working poor. The allegory is signposted, in the manner of 1984.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Birling's confident predictions of peace and the unsinkable Titanic invite hindsight irony. The rest of the play is earnest social argument, with a late twist that complicates the family's reactions.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- The final phone call leaves open whether the family faces consequences or escapes them. The moral lesson is clear, but the plot's truth is left ambiguous, leaving more openness than Crime and Punishment offers.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Three acts follow the real time of one evening in one room, with each character questioned in turn. The only twist is the ending's reframing, so the structure stays simple, like 1984's clear divisions.
How An Inspector Calls is regarded
An Inspector Calls holds a literary regard score of 67 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.