Jan, Mark, Lou and Danny — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Jan, Mark, Lou and Danny
Characters
What you need to know
How Kelly presents Jan, Mark, Lou and Danny, and how the character develops across the text: the followers: Jan and Mark, the double act who bullied Adam and open each section with the latest news, Lou, frightened and quick to blame others, and Danny, who cares most about his place at dental college.
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: 'What are we going to do', 'He's not going', 'Is he off his head', 'Is he insane', 'You had to laugh', 'the expression, the fear', 'Does Phil know', 'We're screwed', 'How am I gonna get references', 'Dentists don't get mixed up in stuff like this', 'Is he serious'.
Jan and Mark as a double act and a chorus: opening every section in the street, finishing each other's sentences, and telling the story of Adam's bullying with laughter that gives away their guilt.
Lou and Danny as frightened followers: Lou's fatalism and readiness to blame others, Danny's fear for his place at dental college, and what the play says about people who simply go along.
OCR's 2024 question names the opening duologues and Danny's worry about his references as moments of worry, with the mirrored lines and unanswerable questions that show it.
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.
