Acceptance and resistance — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Acceptance and resistance
Themes
What you need to know
How Ishiguro explores fate, why the students never run, and the hope of a deferral 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: 'smuggle into our heads a lot of the basic facts about our futures', 'told and not told', 'actually they want me to go on for another eight months', 'but I've learnt to live with it', 'waiting for the day they're told they can stop and become donors', 'We hardly discussed our meeting with Miss Emily and Madame', 'how much we thought they'd aged'.
Why no one runs: the language of acceptance, the deferral rumour as the only hope, students who volunteer for each stage, and the arguments readers have had about their passivity.
Tommy's rage as the nearest thing to rebellion, and what Miss Lucy's anger suggests about the guardians.
Context: Ishiguro's view that 'we can't quite accept our fate', and his answer to readers who ask why the clones never escape: that the reader is asked to 'enter into the conceit'.
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.
