Responsibility and guilt — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Responsibility and guilt
Themes
What you need to know
How Kelly explores responsibility and guilt, as the group denies what it did, shares or shifts the blame, lets an innocent man go to prison and lives with the consequences across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'we did it together', 'Whatever we did, we did', 'We're going to have to tell them', 'I think we should tell someone', 'I feel terrible', 'everything's fine', 'Tell no one', 'Not to frame someone else', 'What have we done', 'man in prison', 'Floods of tears', 'He won't come out of his room'.
How guilt is shown and hidden: Jan and Mark's laughter, Brian's tears, Leah's questions, Cathy's lack of it, and where each of them ends up, from John Tate shut in his room to Phil 'staring at nothing'.
Context: Kelly's question of 'how many wrong things you can do for a greater purpose', and a play as much about the aftermath of violence as the violence itself.
OCR's questions on avoiding the truth (2023) and on a character affected by what happens to Adam (sample paper), and the moments 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.
