Chapters 3 and 4 — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Chapters 3 and 4
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
The first harvest, Boxer's motto, Snowball's committees and the reading classes, Napoleon and the puppies,
the milk and apples kept for the pigs, and the Battle of the Cowshed.
Key quotations: 'How they toiled and sweated to get the hay in!', 'The pigs did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others.', 'The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be.', 'It was always the pigs who put forward the resolutions.', 'Four legs good, two legs bad', 'Napoleon took them away from their mothers', 'The mystery of where the milk went to was soon cleared up.', 'this has been proved by Science, comrades', 'Jones would come back!', 'surely there is no one among you who wants to see Jones come back?', 'a wave of rebelliousness ran through the countryside', 'The pellets scored bloody streaks along Snowball's back', 'rearing up on his hind legs and striking out with his great iron-shod hoofs like a stallion', 'Animal Hero, First Class'.
Narrative voice: the flat, accepting way the narrator reports the pigs' first privileges, so that the reader sees what the animals do not.
Context: the milk and apples, which Orwell called the turning point of the story: the moment when the other animals should have stood up to the pigs.
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.
