How Ishiguro presents Ruth, and how the character develops across the text: Kathy's controlling, insecure friend who keeps Kathy and Tommy apart, longs to fit in, and tries to put things right before she completes.
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: 'He doesn't suspect a thing', 'she was the leader', 'whenever Ruth allowed in a new member', 'Let's agree I got it in the Sale', 'It's all part of what made Hailsham so special', 'I found it at the last Sale', 'the great expert on real families', 'I must have just picked it up', 'If Kathy and I have a good laugh about you', 'I'm not pretending I didn't always see that', 'Put right what I messed up for you'.
Ruth's two sides: the leader of the secret guard who claims gifts and skills she does not have, and the young woman desperate to fit in at the Cottages, who pins her hopes on a possible and an office job.
Ruth near the end: her weakness after her donations, her confession at the boat, and her wish to make amends.
OCR moments: the pencil case, where Kathy helps Ruth out of a 'curious quandary', the search for her possible in Norfolk, and her confession, which OCR's mark scheme lists as unexpected.
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.
