Isolation and companionship — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Isolation and companionship
Themes
What you need to know
How Shelley explores loneliness, isolation and the need for companionship, in the creature, Victor and Walton across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me', 'a solitary chamber, or rather cell', 'I was dependent on none, and related to none', 'Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred', 'no Eve soothed my sorrows, nor shared my thoughts; I was alone', 'I am alone, and miserable; man will not associate with me', 'Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?', 'we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world', 'find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone?', 'I saw an insurmountable barrier placed between me and my fellow-men', 'Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone'.
Places of isolation: the Arctic, the glacier, the hovel and the Orkney island, and who chooses solitude and who has it forced on him.
Edexcel's novel question has two parts, and neither marks context: part (a) on the printed extract marks language, form and structure (AO2); part (b) on the novel elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1), not language analysis. Use context only where it explains a reading, and say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
