The artilleryman — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
The artilleryman
Characters
What you need to know
How Wells presents The artilleryman, and how the character develops across the text: the soldier who survives the first battle, shelters with the narrator, and reappears on Putney Hill with grand plans for humanity's survival underground that he is too idle to carry out.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'began to sob and weep like a little boy', 'It’s no kindness to the right sort of wife', 'Giants in armour, sir. Hundred feet high.', 'It never was a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants', 'We’re eatable ants', 'it’s the man that keeps on thinking comes through', 'Cities, nations, civilisation, progress—it’s all over', 'I mean that men like me are going on living—for the sake of the breed', 'Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die', 'not novels and poetry swipes, but ideas, science books', 'man has come back to his own', 'in a flash I saw the man plain', 'the gulf between his dreams and his powers', 'this strange undisciplined dreamer of great things'.
His two appearances: a terrified survivor in the narrator's house, then a would-be leader whose talk outruns his digging.
Context: late Victorian attempts to apply the 'survival of the fittest' to human society, and the idea of letting only the strong and healthy have children, which Huxley attacked and the artilleryman's plans echo, and the gap between 'a common soldier' and the narrator, 'a professed and recognised writer on philosophical themes'.
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.
