Writer's methods — Animal Farm — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Writer's methods
Writer's methods
What you need to know
How Orwell's form, structure and language create meaning: the beast fable and political allegory, satire and irony, the plain narrative voice,
the circular structure, the Seven Commandments as a record of change, the windmill and other symbols, and songs, slogans and speeches.
Form: a beast fable subtitled A Fairy Story, and a political allegory and satire whose farm stands for the Soviet Union.
Narrative voice: the plain, simple narrator who reports what the animals are told and believe, so that the reader sees the irony they miss.
Structure: the circular plot from the Manor Farm back to the Manor Farm, the Commandments changed one at a time, and the windmill built, destroyed and rebuilt.
Language: speeches, songs and slogans, Squealer's figures and euphemisms, and names such as Napoleon, Squealer and Boxer.
Key quotations: 'Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer', 'Squealer's lists of figures', 'neither the words nor the tune ever seemed to the animals to come up to Beasts of England', 'Curiously enough, Clover had not remembered that the Fourth Commandment mentioned sheets', 'It was as though the windmill had never been.', 'It was as though the world had turned upside-down.', 'It did not seem strange'.
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.
