Guilt and responsibility — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Guilt and responsibility
Themes
What you need to know
How Priestley explores guilt, morality and who is responsible for Eva's death across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I can't accept any responsibility', 'I'll never, never do it again to anybody', 'you killed her', 'I'd give thousands', 'Everything's all right now, Sheila', 'We are responsible for each other', 'guiltily and dumbfounded'.
Who accepts responsibility and who doesn't, and the chain of events that links them.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
