Plot overview — The War of the Worlds — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Plot overview
Introduction
What you need to know
The whole novel in brief, part by part, and how the narrator's story and his brother's run side by side in Book One before Book Two follows the narrator alone.
Where each part's key moments fall, from the first cylinder on Horsell Common to the dead Martians on Primrose Hill, across Book One, The Coming of the Martians, and Book Two, The Earth under the Martians.
How the novel opens with 'No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century' and ends with the narrator and his wife each counted 'among the dead'.
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.
