How Kelly presents Brian and Adam, and how the character develops across the text: the group's two victims: Adam, bullied for wanting to belong, left for dead, found living wild in the wood and killed, and Brian, the tearful boy forced to lie and to identify an innocent man, who ends up on medication and losing his mind.
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: 'Someone pegged a stone at him', 'just for the laugh', 'trying to be part of', 'do anything to be part of the group', 'matted with dried blood', 'as though they are aliens', 'I think we should tell someone', 'you crying little piece of filth', 'I can't face it', 'It makes me cry', 'staring at a wall and drooling', 'Shall we eat the earth'.
Adam: the outsider whose wish to belong made him a target, known at first only through Jan and Mark's story, then seen in Three living rough with a head wound, confused and refusing to come back, before Phil decides he cannot be allowed to.
Brian: the tearful boy who wants to tell the truth, forced to lie to the head teacher and then to identify an innocent man, used to show Cathy how to kill Adam with a plastic bag, and left on medication and losing his grip on reality.
OCR's 2023 comparison extract and the sample paper's both show Brian pressed to go to the police; for the sample paper's question on a character affected by what happens to Adam, Brian's decline is a strong choice when it is linked to the group falling apart.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
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.
