Violence and morality — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Violence and morality
Themes
What you need to know
How Kelly explores violence and morality, from the bullying of Adam to his killing, and the question of whether one person can be sacrificed for everyone 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: 'What's more important', 'one person or everyone', 'Someone pegged a stone at him', 'You had to laugh', 'you'll rot together', 'He can't come back', 'This is insane', 'you're not human', 'There were quite a few', 'They stare at her', 'She cut a first year's finger off', 'Our lives are ruined'.
Leah's chimps and bonobos: whether people are naturally violent like chimps or friendly like bonobos, and whether the title suggests cruelty is 'just in us all'.
Context: Kelly's starting point in the fear of terrorism and his central question of 'whether it was right to sacrifice the individual for the many', which the play leaves the audience to answer.
OCR's 2025 questions on right and wrong and on disagreement, and the comedy beside the horror that can leave an audience 'caught between laughter and tears'.
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.
