How Ishiguro presents Tommy, and how the character develops across the text: the boy mocked for his tantrums and his art, who finds his own way through his animals and his love for Kathy.
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 was just raving, flinging his limbs about', 'like a dog doing a pee', 'seeing Tommy get humiliated yet again', 'Tommy deserved everything he got', 'how Tommy never even tried to be creative', 'he did make an effort for a while', 'the thing had got deeper and deeper', 'But then it grew bigger', 'would get it all going again', 'I felt much better afterwards'.
Tommy's rages: why the other students provoke them, how Miss Lucy's words calm him and then unsettle him, and his screaming after the visit to Madame.
Tommy's animals, drawn late in the hope of a deferral and mocked by Ruth, and his choice to send Kathy away before his fourth donation.
OCR: Tommy at the centre of the 2024 extract, where examiners noted that Kathy's watching may colour how his troubles are told, and Kathy's help after the football game as a moment for part (b).
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.
