Plot overview — DNA — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Plot overview
Introduction
What you need to know
The whole play in brief, section by section, and how the street, field and wood scenes of each section move the story on.
A play of four sections set over a few weeks, each moving from a street to a field to a wood and back to a field (the last has only the street and the field), from Jan and Mark's 'He's dead' to Richard's plea, 'Come back, Phil'.
Where the key moments fall: the news of Adam's death and Phil's plan (One), the postman's arrest and Brian forced to identify him (Two), Adam found alive and killed, and Leah's leaving (Three), and what has become of everyone (Four).
The moments OCR has printed for comparison: Brian pressed to go to the police (2023, beside Decky Does a Bronco), Leah telling Phil she is leaving (2024, beside Invincible) and Cathy explaining how the postman came to be arrested (2025, beside Jerusalem); OCR's sample paper uses Phil's threat to Brian.
The other moments OCR's questions have asked students to explore: characters avoiding the truth (2023), worrying (2024) and disagreeing (2025), and in the sample paper a character affected by what happens to Adam, with the scenes that suit each.
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.
