Identity and what it means to be human — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Identity and what it means to be human
Themes
What you need to know
How Ishiguro explores identity, the souls the guardians tried to prove, and what makes the clones human 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: 'My name is Kathy H', 'they were our only means', 'building up a collection of personal possessions', 'everyone was in awe of her drawing skills', 'Weeks would go by with no one mentioning the subject', 'had souls at all', 'Why train us, encourage us, make us produce all of that?', 'If we were so keen on a person's poetry', 'someone might be afraid of spiders', 'In the way people are afraid of spiders and things', 'the people outside'.
How the students search for themselves: names without surnames, possibles, collections, and art as proof of a self or a soul.
Context: why readers see the novel as a book about 'what it is to be human', and Ishiguro's view that most of the clones' worries 'concern us all'.
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.
