Book Two, Chapters 1 to 5: trapped with the curate — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Book Two, Chapters 1 to 5: trapped with the curate
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
The narrator and the curate in the empty house at Halliford, their journey past the dead to Sheen, the fifth cylinder burying them in a ruined house beside the Martians' pit,
what the narrator sees through the slit in the wall, the struggle over food, the curate's madness and death, the Martian tentacle in the coal cellar, and the silence when the Martians leave.
Key quotations: 'I tired of the sight of his selfish despair', 'He used no Heat-Ray to destroy them, but picked them up one by one', 'the fifth shot from Mars, has struck this house and buried us under the ruins!', 'we could yet struggle bitterly for that horrible privilege of sight', 'He was a stout, ruddy, middle-aged man, well dressed', 'a sustained and cheerful hooting from the Martians', 'I divided the food in the pantry, into rations to last us ten days', 'With one last touch of humanity I turned the blade back and struck him with the butt', 'It was like a black worm swaying its blind head to and fro', 'It had found the door! The Martians understood doors!', 'And oh! the sweetness of the air!'.
Setting: the ruined kitchen and scullery, the triangular hole looking onto the pit, and the red weed that turns the light the 'colour of blood'.
Structure: Book Two's change of pace, from flight across the country to fifteen days in one confined place, counted out day by day.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
