Book Two, Chapters 6 to 10: dead London and the Epilogue — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Book Two, Chapters 6 to 10: dead London and the Epilogue
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
The narrator's emergence into a landscape of red weed, his meeting with the artilleryman on Putney Hill and his plans for life underground, the walk through dead London
and the howling Martian, the dead Martians on Primrose Hill, the narrator's breakdown, his return to Woking and his wife, and the Epilogue's warnings and hopes.
Key quotations: 'the landscape, weird and lurid, of another planet', 'I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow', 'It is all over with humanity', 'An insane resolve possessed me. I would die and end it.', 'slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth', 'By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth', 'The torment was over', 'this dear vast dead city of mine', 'The Last Man Left Alive! Hurrah! The Last Man Left Alive!', 'It was a paper on the probable development of Moral Ideas with the development of the civilising process', 'my wife white and tearless', 'we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man'.
Structure: the turn from despair to rescue by bacteria, read by some as too convenient and by others as prepared from the first sentence, which calls the Martians mortal.
Form: the Epilogue's change to the voice of a writer looking back and forward, and the return to Primrose Hill and to the narrator's study.
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.
