Friendship, love and jealousy — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Friendship, love and jealousy
Themes
What you need to know
How Ishiguro explores friendship, love and jealousy in the triangle of Kathy, Ruth and Tommy 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: 'It's nothing to worry about', 'It'll come off', 'to put things right', 'how perfectly shaped a chance it was for me', 'You're upset because I've managed to move on', 'I didn't take the bait', 'I'm not asking you to forgive me', 'with that little laugh of agreement', 'it felt as though Tommy and I had come close together again'.
The triangle of Kathy, Ruth and Tommy: friendship as the only family the students have, Ruth's jealousy, and love that comes too late.
Love and hope: the rumour that couples truly in love can be granted a deferral, the song Kathy plays over and over, and the river Tommy imagines near the end.
Context: Ishiguro's account of building the novel around a 'central relationships triangle', and his remark that the characters believe love can make them 'exempt from your fate'.
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.
