Chapters 1 and 2 — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Chapters 1 and 2
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Old Major's speech and dream, Beasts of England, the pigs' teaching of Animalism, the Rebellion and Jones's expulsion,
the Seven Commandments and the missing milk.
What each chapter establishes about character and theme, with key quotations.
Key quotations: 'our lives are miserable, laborious, and short', 'No animal in England is free', 'Man is the only creature that consumes without producing', 'All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.', 'Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, / Beasts of every land and clime', 'the golden future time', 'a complete system of thought', 'Will there still be sugar after the Rebellion?', 'a mysterious country called Sugarcandy Mountain', 'they flung themselves upon their tormentors', 'Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy', 'All animals are equal', 'Never mind the milk, comrades!', 'it was noticed that the milk had disappeared'.
Structure: the novella opens with a speech and a song, and the Commandments painted on the barn wall become the record of every later change.
Context: Old Major's speech and the Rebellion as the ideas of Marx and Lenin and the revolution of 1917.
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.
