Memory and loss — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Memory and loss
Themes
What you need to know
How Ishiguro explores memory, nostalgia and loss, and Kathy's need to hold on to the past when she has no future 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: 'I still see things that will remind me of Hailsham', 'the corner of a misty field', 'when I've tried to leave Hailsham behind', 'The memories I value most, I don't see them ever fading', 'I won't lose my memories of them', 'even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly', 'Maybe I'm remembering it wrong', 'as a way of affirming Hailsham', 'the fact that it was still there in our memories', 'let go and fly away', 'everything I'd lost', 'to stop and think and remember'.
Why Kathy tells her story: memories as all she has left, the lost tape and its return, the clown and the balloons, Hailsham's closing, and the last scene in the empty fields.
Context: memory as Ishiguro's lasting subject, from the narrators of his earlier novels to the themes named when he won the Nobel Prize.
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.
