Two: framing the postman — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Two: framing the postman
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Jan and Mark's news that someone refuses to go, Leah reporting to Phil how the plan was carried out, and the group in the wood: a real postman arrested, with his DNA on Adam's jumper,
Cathy's part in it, Brian's refusal to identify the postman and Phil's threat to throw him down the shaft, and Leah's belief that changing one thing changes the world.
Key quotations: 'He's not going', 'Is he off his head', 'What have we done', 'There were quite a few', 'We showed initiative', 'Not to frame someone else', 'We're going to have to tell them', 'But it is like this', 'You're going in', 'I can't face it', 'you'll rot together', 'you can change the world'.
Structure: the first section's pattern repeated with higher stakes, each scene adding a problem: Brian's refusal, Leah's report that the plan has been carried out, the crisis in the wood, and Leah's hope that one change could alter everything, answered by Phil's single 'No'.
The wood scene OCR has printed most: Brian pressed to go to the police (2023) and Cathy explaining the postman's arrest (2025), and in the sample paper Phil, who 'lays a hand on his shoulder' before threatening Brian.
Forensic DNA as the plot's engine: the invented suspect, the jumper in a plastic bag, and the real DNA that turns a lie into an innocent man's arrest.
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.
