Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War: Paranoia and Paradox

Abstract

‘If schools are what they were in my time,’ Tom Brown’s father tells his son in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, ‘You’ll see a great many cruel blackguard things done, and hear a great deal of foul bad talk.’1 Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War suggests that, a century and a half later, schools are still what they once were. In this story of the evil machinations surrounding the fund-raising chocolate sale at Trinity High, the boys speak a great deal of foul bad talk, and do a great many cruel blackguard things; and that has created a lot of controversy. Many readers have complained that The Chocolate War is an inaccurate representation of reality, a vision of a hopeless world that encourages an unhealthy hopelessness in young readers.2 During one of the many attempts to censor the book, in Proctor, Vermont in 1981, a parent nicely summed up this sort of response in two short sentences: ‘I thought it was hostile and totally disgusting. To show that evil triumphs is kind of sick to me.’3KeywordsYoung ReaderHappy EndingParanoid DelusionInaccurate RepresentationHeroic ActionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.