Writer's methods — The War of the Worlds — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Writer's methods
Writer's methods
What you need to know
How Wells's form, structure and language create meaning: a first-person narrator looking back on the invasion, a documentary style full of real places, times and newspapers,
the brother's second-hand story, two books, shifts of scale that make humans seem like animals, the sights and sounds of the invasion, and the new genre of science fiction.
The first-person narrator, writing 'six years ago now' about the invasion, who mixes eyewitness memory with what he has learned since and admits what he cannot know.
A documentary style: real places from Woking to Primrose Hill, times, newspapers and telegrams, as in 'That was how the Sunday Sun put it', which make the impossible seem real.
Two narratives: the narrator's own and his brother's, told second-hand, and the panoramic view from 'a balloon in the blazing blue above London'.
Shifts of scale: humans seen as 'the infusoria under the microscope', ants, rabbits and frogs, and Martian machines that 'seemed infinitely more alive' than the Martians.
Sound, light and colour: the green smoke, the red weed and the Black Smoke, the howl of 'Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla', and pathetic fallacy in the storm and in the dawn on Primrose Hill.
Foreshadowing and structure: 'the last civilised dinner', the two books, and an ending prepared in the first sentence's 'as mortal as his own'.
Genre: early science fiction and the invasion story, and Wells's realism about the fantastic: an invasion from space set among real, accurately drawn places and the ordinary details of suburban life.
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.
