As I have been reading The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier, I’ve been mapping the characters and their relationships to one another in my head. There is a different narrator in just about every chapter, so this can be difficult as more and more characters are introduced. However, I’ve noticed that despite the narrator switching, the different scenes still revolve around the same few characters – Jerry, Archie, and Brother Leon. From each new narrator’s view, we get a different perspective of these characters, and a better understanding about how they operate under the often oppressive power structures of Trinity. For example, although we know that Brother Leon is obsessed with the chocolate sale, we would not know the full extent of it without his interactions with the various narrators: discovering through Archie why the chocolate sale is important to Leon; learning through Brian Cochran the pickiness and physical stress that accompany Leon’s obsession; and understanding through David Caroni the lengths Leon will go to in order to control every student’s participation in the sale. In the first few chapters it is unclear who the main characters are, but it becomes clearer the more the story progresses.

On another note, we also might not know how eerily similar Archie and Brother Leon are without the multiple perspectives offered in the book. I was repeatedly struck by how they are in such similar institutional positions and how their personalities mirror each other. Both Brother Leon and Archie are the underlings of the official heads of their respective groups, but they are the ones who hold the real operational power. Each one has a thirst for power and a desire to exert total control over their group by assuming the highest institutional position. The pair also push the limits of their challenges – Brother Leon by assigning a likely impossible number of boxes to each student, and Archie by failing to draw the black marble in every single assignment. Although Archie doesn’t paint himself or Brother Leon in a particularly positive light, without a variety of different narrators offering their views and interpretations of Archie and Brother Leon we might not know how power-thirsty they really are.