How Ishiguro presents Kathy H, and how the character develops across the text: the carer and narrator who looks back on Hailsham, loyal to Ruth and Tommy, and who accepts her own fate as a donor.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'My name is Kathy H', 'I know for a fact', 'Anyway, I'm not making any big claims for myself', 'not trying to boast', 'it means a lot to me', 'just going through the motions', 'So I reached forward and put a hand on his arm', 'Ruth's urgent whisper to me to come back', 'I shouldn't look back so much', 'in the end, it wears you down', 'it feels just about right to be finishing', 'tears rolling down my face'.
Kathy as narrator: her chatty, careful voice, the clichés and limits of her language, and the moments when she admits she may be remembering wrongly.
Kathy as a carer: her pride in the work and her impatience with carers who give up, set against her exhaustion and loss at the end.
OCR's 2025 question on Kathy's time as a carer: the moments the mark scheme suggests, from her opening words to the end, and what OCR's examiners praised in answers that traced her move from early optimism to later resignation.
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.
