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.’³