Robert Cormier American Literature Analysis
In 1974, when Cormier agreed to allow Pantheon to market The Chocolate War as a young-adult novel, the little-known journalist who had been writing adult fiction for several decades became almost instantly one of the most popular and respected writers in the young-adult field. This novel about a teenager fighting almost alone against the evil at a Catholic boys’ school—and apparently losing—caused an immediate sensation and controversy.
Cormier’s novels since The Chocolate War have continued to take as their subjects extreme, often violent, acts. I Am the Cheese (1977) is a mystery thriller about a young boy trying to learn his family history before the killers pursuing his parents and himself catch them all. After the First Death (1979) is a violent novel about terrorists taking over a schoolbus full of children. The Bumblebee Flies Anyway (1983) is a bleak depiction of a young boy trying to find out why he is in a hospital with terminally ill children. Beyond the Chocolate War (1985) continues some of the same themes of Cormier’s first young-adult novel, but it focuses on different characters. Fade concerns several generations of a family tragically gifted with the power of invisibility. Cormier produced some of the most vivid and compelling works in the young-adult field, but his subjects are often grim and his treatment rarely sentimental.
Approximately every three years, Cormier contributed another important, if unsettling, work to the canon of young-adult fiction. Not only are his novels set in the same general location, in various urban, suburban, or rural locales in northeastern Massachusetts, but they are also linked by a careful formal technique. The point of view in each novel, for example, is usually multiple or complex and aids in the suspense that builds throughout the work. The language of the novels is not difficult for younger readers and is usually recognizable for its metaphorical intent (the religious symbolism in The Chocolate War, for example). Characterization is facile and at times two-dimensional, but the tense structure of each work keeps the action moving quickly. Cormier’s novels highlight his unique protagonists in their struggles with forces more powerful than themselves.
Cormier’s novels resemble one another most significantly in their themes. All of his young-adult works focus on an individual struggling to survive in a society dominated by evil and defined by violence. The individual has few chances against the system or the institution he or she faces but usually manages to bring meaning to these struggles for survival. Most of Cormier’s heroes are male, but Kate Forrester, the schoolbus driver who dies trying to save the children from the terrorists who hold them, is the real heroine of After the First Death. In spite of the similarity of his subjects, Cormier’s novels are hardly formulaic, and each one has its own special appeal. If each is somehow bleak or depressing, it is also compelling in its own way.
Cormier’s novels are not didactic; his protagonists face their situations without benefit of authorial moralizing. Yet his heroes often leave readers with a real sense of courage: Young people, in the face of almost overwhelming odds, somehow manage to carve meaning out of their desperate lives. In a culture in which young people are often seen as soft or cynical, Cormier’s is an inspiring model.
Cormier had noted that his focus is on the individual versus the system. The institutions which represent this “system” change from novel to novel—from the Catholic prep school in The Chocolate War to the corrupt government agencies in I Am the Cheese to the impersonal hospital in The Bumblebee Flies Anyway
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The Bumblebee Flies Anyway—but the focus tends to remain on innocent individuals struggling against these evil agencies. In one sense, then, Cormier was a very political writer, for he was concerned with the power relationships among individuals and institutions and with the ways that those institutions (and the people who run them) misuse their power. The villains in his novels are not institutions but the authoritarian individuals acting in their names (Brother Leon in The Chocolate War, Dr. Lakendorp in The Bumblebee Flies Anyway) without regard for individual human need.
Like many political novelists, Cormier was at heart a moralist. He applauded those individuals (such as Jerry Renault in The Chocolate War) who stand up against the system and are martyred in their battles with it. Cormier’s connections to Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Ken Kesey, and other American writers in this tradition of social protest are clear.
Cormier’s success as a writer can be gauged by the number of awards he garnered over the length of his career, both as a newpaperman and as a writer for young people. When The Chocolate War was first published in 1974, the American Library Association’s Booklist journal gave the novel a black-bordered review, indicating an obituary for naïve optimism. Prior to this work, even the most realistic young-adult novel had left its protagonists on an upbeat note. After The Chocolate War, the young-adult novel was capable of true tragedy. More than any other single writer, Cormier was responsible for having broadened the possibilities of the young-adult genre.
The Chocolate War
First published: 1974
Type of work: Novel
Jerry Renault learns much during his freshman year at a Catholic boys’ school and gains his own identity.
The Chocolate War is an unrelentingly bleak account of life in a Catholic boys’ school, from its opening line (“They murdered him.”) to the closing defeat of its young protagonist and the reascendancy of the school’s evil forces. Yet the novel is also an important example of the realistic quality of much young-adult fiction, and it is certainly Cormier’s strongest effort in this field.
Set in a small New England city, the novel could take place in any urban academic setting—at least in any school where the pressures of grades, conformity, and repressed sexuality create an unhealthy and competitive atmosphere. Trinity is a school where privacy is nonexistent, where teachers intimidate students, and where students brutalize one another. Cormier’s view of Trinity is singularly gloomy, but few readers would argue that it is totally unrealistic.
The story in this short, fast-paced novel is neither complex nor difficult. Jerry Renault is in his first year at Trinity and is trying to become a quarterback on the football team. He needs this success badly, for his mother has died the previous spring, and Jerry is living in an apartment with his father, who sleepwalks through his days. Jerry wants desperately to fit in, but a contrary impulse also motivates him. In his school locker, Jerry has a poster that showsa wide expanse of beach, a sweep of sky with a lone star glittering far away. A man walked on the beach, a small solitary figure in all that immensity. At the bottom of the poster, these words appeared—Do I dare disturb the universe? By [T. S.] Eliot, who wrote the Waste Land thing they were studying in English. Jerry wasn’t sure of the poster’s meaning. But it had moved him mysteriously.
In the course of The Chocolate War, Jerry will discover the full import of the poster’s message.
Jerry accepts an “assignment,” or school stunt, from the powerful Vigils secret society to refuse to sell chocolates in the annual Trinity sale, but when the ten days of his prank are up, Jerry continues his rebellion, in protest now against the authoritarian tactics of Brother Leon, the acting headmaster, and against Jerry’s own isolation at the school. He gains a new identity through his rebellion: “I’m Jerry Renault and I’m not going to sell the chocolates,” he declares to Brother Leon and his homeroom. The Vigils, enlisted by Brother Leon, however, whip up school support for the chocolate sale and ensure that every student has sold his fifty boxes—every one except Jerry.
Emile Janza, a school bully who badly wants to get into the Vigils, gathers a gang of younger kids to beat up Jerry, and when Archie, the leader of the Vigils, arranges a boxing match in front of the whole student body between Jerry and Janza, Jerry accepts. The fight has been arranged so that Jerry cannot win, and in fact the young hero loses the very individuality he had earlier gained in his protest. In the end, as Jerry is being treated for a possible broken jaw and internal injuries, he is advising his friend Goober not to “disturb the universe,” and the Vigils and Brother Leon are even more firmly in control of Trinity.
The meaning of The Chocolate War is complex and, for many readers, depressing—the makers of the 1989 film of the novel created a more upbeat ending—but it is an important novel for young people. As with any work of this complexity, there are a number of subthemes: loss, violence in its many forms, and power—how it is maintained in human society and the hatred and brutality that its misuse breeds. The Chocolate War is a novel of initiation in which the young protagonist, like the reader, learns a number of crucial lessons about the adult world—most of them negative.
Like all Cormier’s novels, the central theme of The Chocolate War is the relation of the individual to society and the price one pays for conformity or (the other side of this theme) the greater sacrifices one must make in order to realize one’s individuality. Jerry’s protest is not easy for him to carry out, but he gains a new identity through his actions. What this idea becomes in the novel is the concept of being true to oneself and standing up to the evil that one perceives in the world.
The only character who is true to himself in the novel is Jerry—but at a terrible price. Goober tries to emulate Jerry but, in a crucial test, caves in. When the Vigils make sure that a “50” is posted after his name in the auditorium, representing boxes of chocolates sold, Goober does not have the courage to challenge it and tell the truth. The situation raises all kinds of questions, in the novel as in society: Which is more important, loyalty to oneself or to the group? Which takes more courage? What are the real consequences of conformity? How can evil be stopped except by heroic individual human action?
In the end, Jerry did disturb the universe: He stood up against peer pressure and teacher intimidation to protest the evil he recognized in the world, and his example is a model of courage in the face of cowardice and conformity. He is, in the true sense of the word, a martyr, and, if he gives in at the end, that action only makes the novel more psychologically realistic and his earlier courage even greater. The evil at Trinity can only be defeated if more people speak up. The power of The Chocolate War is this social and psychological realism: The novel shows what can happen to people who stand up for their rights in a totalitarian system.
There are several stylistic elements that distinguish The Chocolate War from most young-adult novels and that distinguish Cormier as a writer. For one thing, the multiple points of view in the novel provide a much more complex structure than that of most adolescent novels. The language in the book is not very difficult, but the honest and mature matter in which its subjects are treated may cause problems for some readers. The students here act like real teenagers—they swear and frequently think about sex. Irony plays a large part in the novel, and readers will notice the double meanings that pepper The Chocolate War.
There is also rich religious symbolism. On one level, Jerry is a Christ figure who tries to change the world but is metaphorically crucified in the attempt. Trinity is a religious school, but evil there dominates any kind of Christian love or spirit. The complex religious symbolism in the novel underscores the themes that Cormier is raising: Must someone else be crucified before the evil is banished? Finally, as a powerful psychological novel, The Chocolate War’s characterization is realistic if unremittingly grim.
I Am the Cheese
First published: 1977
Type of work: Novel
In this mystery thriller a young boy tries to determine his family’s history and fate.
Cormier’s next novel, I Am the Cheese, was a departure from his first success in a number of ways. The multiple points of view of the first novel become, in the second, a mosaic of perspectives that challenge the reader and build the tension in the novel until its very last word.
Even the innocuous opening of the novel—“I am riding the bicycle and I am on Route 31 in Monument, Massachusetts, on my way to Rutterburg, Vermont, and I’m pedaling furiously”—raises mysteries: Who is riding, and why? The second chapter only adds to readers’ confusion, for it starts with a transcript of what appears to be a counseling session between a boy, Adam Farmer, and a psychiatrist. Is Adam trying to recall his own lost history, or is his interrogator trying to get information from him?
What is slowly revealed, as Adam uncovers his past for the reader and for the mysterious Brint, is that his father had been a reporter for a small New York State newspaper who discovered evidence of government corruption and testified in Washington about what he knew. When attempts were made on his life, Anthony Delmonte joined a witness protection program, and he and his wife and small son, Paul, were given new names and identities and moved to Monument, Massachusetts. The new identities do not shield them, however; Grey, the government contact responsible for the family, is apparently a double agent. The family is forced to flee Monument, and Adam’s parents are killed. In the stunning shock of the last chapter, it is revealed that Adam/Paul’s “furious” bike ride has only been around the grounds of a hospital where he is a so-called patient, and where some malevolent and mysterious government agency has confined him, after murdering his parents, until they can decide what is to be done with him or (as the last paragraph reveals) “until termination procedures are approved.”
This is no simplistic young-adult work; rather, it is a thriller in which the reader is left hanging until the very end—and beyond, in fact, for the boy’s fate is intentionally unresolved. Similarly, it is no didactic novel: If there is a lesson here, it is the same one as in many adult thrillers, to trust no one, not even—or especially not—the government. Like The Chocolate War, however, there is also the theme of the young innocent trying to establish his identity in a violent world where the authorities (government agents here, school officials in the earlier novel) are doing everything they can to destroy the will of the young protagonist. The novel was chosen one of the best books of the year for young readers by both The New York Times Book Review and the Young-Adult Services division of the American Library Association.
As with all Cormier titles, the literary technique is prominent and facilitates meaning and power. The point of view and plot are both structured so that the tension of the novel is increased until the very last page. (The film that was made of the novel in 1983 only turned the suspense into confusion.) As in The Chocolate War, the literary language and imagery reinforce meaning. The title comes from the children’s song, “The Farmer in the Dell.” Adam is himself the “farmer,” at least in one of his identities, but in the end he does “stand alone,” like the cheese of the last line of the song.
The Bumblebee Flies Anyway
First published: 1983
Type of work: Novel
Young Barney Snow tries to discover why he is in a hospital with terminally ill young people.
The Bumblebee Flies Anyway has another institutional setting (a hospital, as in I Am the Cheese), but there is perhaps a larger glimmer of hope, for the focus of the novel is on the meaning that the individual can make of his own life, in spite of overwhelming odds—in this case, imminent death.
As in I Am the Cheese, the tension is almost unbearable. Barney Snow is in “the Complex,” his name for a hospital for the incurably ill, but he does not know why he is there, for he is clearly not ill. All he knows for certain is that he is part of an experiment, as are the other young patients around him, and is being administered drugs under the careful supervision of the person he calls “the Handyman,” Dr. Lakendorp. The story of the novel is Barney’s attempt to piece together his past and with it the reasons that he is there.
His story is also tied up with the lives of the other terminally ill patients in his ward, such as Mazzo, Billy, and others. Barney falls in love with Mazzo’s sister, Cassie, who comes to visit her twin brother but who uses Barney for her own ends, and the relationship actually provides some relief from the clinical setting. Barney is also fascinated with “the bumblebee,” a wooden mock-up of a sports car that sits in a lot next to the hospital. When Barney finally discerns the truth—that he is just as ill as all the other patients there and is a victim of medical experiments to make him forget his past, including his earlier hospitalization—he gets the car to the roof of the hospital and makes elaborate plans to give Mazzo one last ride.
Mazzo dies in Barney’s arms, however, and Barney lets the bumblebee fly off the roof empty, in the dramatic high point of the novel and in a conclusion that gives readers some release from the gloom that has preceded it. The flight of the car becomes Barney’s transcendence from this life and from the pain and suffering that surround him.
Although The Bumblebee Flies Anyway resembles I Am the Cheese and The Chocolate War most in its bleak setting and mood, it also resembles them in its theme, the struggle of the individual to stay alive and to beat the system in even the most dire circumstances. In an institution that (under the guise of scientific experimentation to lessen suffering) is actually playing callously with human life, Barney frees himself and perhaps others; he cannot beat death (as no one can), but he helps his friend Mazzo, and his own end is clearly brightened by what he has been able to accomplish. Like Randle P. McMurphy in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), another novel about men trapped in inhuman institutions, Barney Snow leaves a heroic echo for readers.
Cormier’s gift is his ability to sustain the tension, and reader interest, amid subjects so morbid and themes so heavy. There are problems with the novel—with characterization, for example; Cassie never really comes alive for readers as she so clearly does for Barney, and Dr. Lakendorp remains a monster instead of a human being throughout the book. Most of the elements in the novel, however, help to reinforce the powerful and poignant story. Like the most significant of contemporary adult titles, The Bumblebee Flies Anyway brings up significant social problems, not only the issue of death, for example, but also the question of medical ethics.
Fade
First published: 1988
Type of work: Novel
The gift of becoming physically invisible is a curse to several generations of a New England family, as Paul Moreaux discovers.
Fade is possibly the blackest of Cormier’s realist young-adult novels, and there is some question whether it is a young-adult work at all. Cormier seems to be aspiring to the popular adult genre (popular with teenagers, as well) presided over by such writers as Stephen King and V. C. Andrews. The sex, the violence, and, more than anything, the tone of this supernatural story raise questions about its appropriateness for the teenage audience.
The summary printed on the publishing information page (a common practice in young-adult novels) only hints at the violence of the novel: “Paul Moreaux, the thirteen-year-old son of French Canadian immigrants, inherits the ability to become invisible, but this power soon leads to death and destruction,” The novel itself is broken into five uneven parts.
In the first, Paul Moreaux narrates the story of his realization in 1938, at the age of thirteen, of his fateful power. Paul discovers, from his Uncle Adelard, that every generation of this fated family produces a member with the supernatural power to become invisible. The nomadic Adelard has it; now he identifies it in his nephew Paul. The power seems to be a teenager’s fantasy come true: to be able to go into houses unseen and spy on lives. What Paul witnesses while in “the fade,” however, hardly brings him joy: He sees only the evil, including his own, of which humans are capable, especially behind closed doors. In particular, he witnesses two sexual acts (cunnilingus and incest) and spies on and lusts after his own Aunt Rosanna.
The power of the first half of the novel lies not only in Paul’s story of his newfound invisibility but also in the broader background of Paul’s history. In no earlier Cormier novel has there been such a rich historical setting: the French Canadian family struggling to survive in late 1930’s America, the labor struggles of a depressed New England factory town, and the violent strike that ends the struggle. Paul sees personal evil in the fade, but in his normal self he witnesses the evil that socioeconomic conditions produce.
The second half of the novel is much choppier. In the next segment, and in present fictional time, a young female cousin of Paul works with his literary agent in New York trying to determine if the manuscript fragment that is the first half of Fade is really the work of the famous “Paul Roget,” the novelist who died at age forty-two in 1967. The third and fourth sections continue the manuscript, as Paul discovers who has the “fade” in the next generation and tracks him down. This is where the “death and destruction” begin, for the thirteen-year-old Ozzie Slater, the abandoned son of Paul’s sister Rose, has become a psychopathic killer who is terrorizing the small Maine town where he lives. In the novel’s final violent scene, the older fader must kill his successor.
What bothers some critics and reviewers of young-adult fiction about this Cormier novel is more than its sex and violence. The sexuality in the first part is certainly adult, and is sickening to the young Paul. In the second half of the novel, the sex disappears and is replaced by grisly violence, in a supernatural story that rivals those of Stephen King and other practitioners of this adult genre. What is most bothersome is that there is no serious theme to balance the sex and violence; rather, the focus of the novel is on the effects themselves, and the author’s aim seems to be to startle and frighten the reader.
Many of the elements in the novel are autobiographical, but Cormier seems to be unable to find the lessons from his story that have been the strengths of all his earlier works. The simplest contrast is to I Am the Cheese, as both novels are suspenseful thrillers with violent endings. In the earlier work, however, Adam Farmer seemed to be trying to make sense of his past and to resist the forces threatening him in the present. Paul Moreaux’s life, on the contrary, has no such inherent meaning (except perhaps involving how to cope with the “fade”), and the juxtaposition of the secondary plot in the present time mitigates what meaning there may be in his story.