The Chocolate War

The decade of the 1970s was a period of significant social and political upheaval in the United States. The Chocolate War raises questions about authority, rebellion, and the individual’s role in society, which are reflective of 1970s thought. The inciting incidents for such questions occurred in the 1960s and grew during the next decade: the Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers, and the Watergate scandal tarnished many Americans’ trust in their government. Activists embraced social justice, sexual freedom, and workplace equality causes. The concept of counterculture prompted young people to reconsider their roles and responsibilities to society. Personal liberation and rebellion against authority—including government, religion, and other cultural institutions—were key themes of the 1970s as young Americans rejected the values of previous generations and sought to redefine themselves.

This search for a new national identity is symbolized by the teens in the novel, especially Jerry Renault. Jerry and the other boys are in turmoil as they attempt to define their own identities amid conflicting expectations of parents, teachers, and peers in a changing cultural landscape. Cormier makes the tension between generational traditions and 1970s counterculture explicit in a brief interaction between Jerry and a young “hippie” at the bus stop when Jerry feels jealous of the youth’s carefree sloppiness in contrast with his own Trinity-dress-code shirt and tie. The boy’s warning to Jerry, that “You’re missing a lot of things in the world” (21), sticks with him, prompting him to tear off his tie and confront questions about meaning and purpose. Jerry questions the purpose of his decisions. He frequently wonders whether he will be doomed to the type of scripted life he sees the adults around him living, confined to school, marriage, children, work, and death. Mirroring society as a whole in the 1970s, Jerry’s eventual decision not to participate in the chocolate sale is a gesture of rebellion against the rigid expectations and traditions of institutional authority, and an effort to define his future on his terms rather than on those proscribed by the past.

The 1970s also saw a conservative backlash against these shifting norms and rejections of authority, with many Americans being drawn to the stability of traditional values and fundamentalist religious teachings. They formed powerful blocs that lobbied against social change, feminism, and individual freedoms, in much the same way that the power structures of the Vigils and the Brothers in the novel represent a bulwark of tradition striving to maintain the existing social order against “demonstrations, protests, all that crap” (27). The tension between old and new cultural values of the 1970s underpins and gives weight to all of the central themes in The Chocolate War. The novel’s conclusion, like the American culture wars that began in the 1970s, suggests that there are no clear answers or resolutions.