Context — Never Let Me Go — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The contexts of Never Let Me Go: Ishiguro's life and earlier novels, the late 1990s England in which the novel is set, the cloning debate of the 1990s,
the novel's place in dystopian and science fiction, and the school story it borrows from.
How to use this context in an answer about the novel rather than as background.
Ishiguro's life: born in Nagasaki in 1954, he came to Guildford with his family in 1960, aged five, when his father, an oceanographer, took up research in England; he wrote songs and worked as a social worker before studying creative writing at the University of East Anglia.
His earlier novels, from A Pale View of Hills (1982) to The Remains of the Day (1989), which won the Booker Prize, and When We Were Orphans (2000): narrators looking back on their lives, and his lasting themes of memory, time and self-delusion.
How the novel was written: an idea from about 1990 about a group of students with a 'strange fate hanging over them', set aside and taken up again when cloning was in the news after Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996; published by Faber in 2005 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
The setting: an England of the late 1990s much like the real one, apart from a hidden system of cloned donors; Ishiguro's lack of interest in the science, and his plan to paint every place Kathy goes like 'Norfolk on a grey day'.
Childhood and protection: Ishiguro's view of Hailsham as the sheltered world that adults build for all children, controlling a 'bubble of innocence' around them.
Genre: a dystopia with a 'cold undercurrent of science fiction', written when Ishiguro felt free to use what he calls genre tropes.
The Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, for novels 'of great emotional force', and his knighthood in 2018.
Context in OCR's answers: in part (a), what the two extracts and their introductions show about the characters' lives and relationships, such as Kathy's place as both old friend and carer, rather than background learned beforehand; part (b) gives no marks for context unless it supports the answer.
In OCR's exam, this background earns no marks of its own: part (a) credits the context you can infer from the two printed extracts and their introductions, and part (b) doesn't mark context. Know it to understand the text, and use it in an answer only where it explains a reading.
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.
