Benjamin and Clover — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Benjamin and Clover
Characters
What you need to know
How Orwell presents Benjamin and Clover, and how the character develops across the text: the cynical donkey who understands but does not act, and the motherly mare who senses that the Rebellion has gone wrong.
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: 'Benjamin was the oldest animal on the farm, and the worst tempered', 'he would sooner have had no tail and no flies', 'Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey', 'Benjamin could read as well as any pig, but never exercised his faculty', 'life would go on as it had always gone on—that is, badly', 'seemed to understand, but would say nothing', 'the unalterable law of life', 'Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life', 'Clover made a sort of wall round them with her great foreleg', 'These scenes of terror and slaughter were not what they had looked forward to', 'a society of animals set free from hunger and the whip', 'it was not for this that she and all the other animals had hoped and toiled', 'Get out quickly! They are taking you to your death!', 'Are the Seven Commandments the same as they used to be, Benjamin?'.
Benjamin's silence and Clover's loyalty: why neither stops the pigs, and the evening Benjamin finally reads the wall to her.
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.
