One: a death and a cover-up — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
One: a death and a cover-up
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Jan and Mark's news of a death, Leah talking to a silent Phil in the field, and the group in the wood: John Tate's threats, Richard's challenge and the account of how Adam was bullied and fell through the grille,
Phil's first words and his plan to send the police after an invented stranger with planted DNA, and Leah's speech about bonobos and chimps to a Phil who says nothing.
Key quotations: 'We need to talk to you', 'brutal terror', 'I'm finding this all quite stressful', 'do not use that word', 'bite their face', 'You shouldn't threaten me John', 'you crying little piece of filth', 'I think we should tell someone', 'Someone pegged a stone at him', 'laughing harder than anyone', 'we did it together', 'a fat Caucasian male'.
Structure: the pattern of the whole play set up at once, as a short street scene raises a mystery, the field shows Leah talking while Phil eats in silence, and the long ensemble scene in the wood gathers everyone except Adam.
Phil's first words, which come only when John Tate has lost control: the plan to take Adam's jumper, have Brian report a stranger in the woods and plant a stranger's DNA; and the section's end, as Leah talks about bonobos and chimps and tries strangling herself to get a reaction.
Moments from this section that OCR's questions have named: Jan's reluctance to believe Mark and John Tate's insistence that 'everything's fine' (avoiding the truth), and the group's first reactions to the death, Danny's fears for his future among them (disagreeing).
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.
