The Chocolate War Study Guide

The Chocolate War

One. The novel’s first sentence is “They murdered him,” which announces the theme of violence. How is this novel about violence and mayhem?

Peer pressure too often compels us to abandon individual conscience and obey the whims of the tribe, and too often the tribe’s whims veer to violence. To obey peer pressure results in the abandonment of critical thinking, morality, and humanity. We become dehumanized.

The Tribe offers us entrance and eventual belonging (and rank) in the Inner Circle, but we must comply and conform to the Tribe’s demands, especially those demands that exact cruelty upon others.

As soon as we rationalize doing the tribe’s bidding, we murder our own soul. At times, the tribe collectively murders our will to stand up for ourselves and others.

We break down, get tired, give up, become apathetic, and we surrender to moral cowardice.

Such moral cowardice is a major theme in the novel.

We are tested.

The tribe “tests” us, as The Goober tells his friend Jerry Renault, who is getting crushed during football practice.

What is being tested? Notions of manhood and loyalty to the tribe, and how that loyalty makes one willing to surrender individual morality and conscience to meet the tribe’s demands.

Belonging to the tribe results in dehumanization.

Jerry sees the other football players on the field as “grotesque unknown creatures,” pointing to their dehumanization.

Jerry himself feels dehumanized. Part of his dehumanization is the result of his cowardice, which prevents him from standing up for himself and results in self-loathing and self-hatred.

Dehumanization is gradual.

Dehumanization doesn’t happen overnight. It happens in increments.

Two. The Coach asks Jerry Renault why a shrimp like him is trying out for football quarterback. Why is Renault doing so?

Some might argue that Jerry, who recently lost his mother to cancer, is trying to escape the grief over such a huge loss. Or that the pain from football is a welcome substitute to the pain of mourning for the loss of his mother, and he needs a distraction.

Sometimes when we are grieving, we go through so much pain that we eventually face an emptiness and numbness that can only be remedied, we believe, through self-hurt. We become desperate to feel--anything--even if the feeling is excruciating pain.

Three. Describe the complicated relationship between Obie and Archie.

Obie, referred to as an “errand boy,” hates and admires his boss, Archie, the seemingly sociopathic high official of the school underground gang or organization called The Vigils, who spends his time devising schemes and humiliating “assignments” while showing off his disbelief in religion and his general embrace of nihilism (the belief that nothing matters in this world because everything is BS).

Archie is a sort of deputy (The Assigner) to the head honcho Carter, the boss of The Vigils while Obie is a low-ranking secretary.

Archie wallows in his power and his condescension over the human race while Obie envies Archie for being so cool and apparently dispassionate about everything.

Archie is repulsed by physical violence and human sweat, but he relishes in psychological games and emotional warfare. He is a toxic soul who, unhappy, wants to make sure he makes others’ lives a living hell. If he can “murder” a human soul, he feels he has triumphed.

In Chapter 2, Archie says, “What the hell do they think I am?” suggesting he is full of self-regard and self-grandiosity. He is overcome by the sin of pride.

Obie can never trust Archie because Archie is duplicitous, a person of total affect, pretense, and facade.

In many ways, Archie is the Devil.

As the Devil, Archie needs to torment those who will put up a good fight and those who show special vulnerabilities. Archie is drawn to Jerry based on Jerry’s suffering and loss of his mother. An opportunity for cruelty and nihilism and the opportunity to see someone with a rich soul lose that soul is irresistible to Archie. Killing souls is Archie’s full-time job. Why? In part, because Archie is already dead, and he needs company.

The novel is nothing less than the fight for the human soul in the face of the tribe’s demands.

Four. What is it about Brother Leon that terrifies Archie?

That adults are not masters of their existence, that they run scared, that they have no answers, that they are morally crippled and corrupt, that at the end of the day they are scared little children wearing a facade.

Adults spend their whole lives conforming to a script to impress others, to put up a facade that will win respect, veneration, and approval. But beneath this facade is a terrified soul anxious that any misstep may result in a stumble that will result in humiliation and ridicule.

No doubt, Archie sees a reflection of himself in this portrait since he tries to portray himself as the Big Guy looking down at all the puny adolescent peons of his school.

Brother Leon, Trinity’s assistant headmaster, and Archie, Vigils’ deputy, are soulmates, two devilish souls entwined in skullduggery, including a corrupt chocolate sale, which includes a suspiciously large order of Mother’s Day chocolates with purple ribbons. Clearly, Brother Leon has committed some kind of impropriety, which we can only imagine though it’s hinted that Brother Leon purchased the chocolates at a great price as a money grab for the school. And he needs Archie’s help to expedite the situation.

Like Archie, Brother Leon is cruel and sadistic and he seeks out those with vulnerabilities and weaknesses and loves “exploiting those weaknesses” (25).

Leon won’t utter the Vigils by name, but he relies on their power to keep the school under control, the way prison guards rely on the inmate “shot callers” to manage the rest of the prison population.

In the famous Chapter 6 where Leon humiliates Bailey as a cheater, using several logical fallacies, we see that Leon is a grown-up version of Archie, a man who relishes in playing games with people’s heads, gaslighting others, and causing mayhem because his own inner torment compels him to torment others.

Five. What demons must Jerry face now that his mother has died a cruel death from cancer?

He suffers shame from his own sense of powerlessness to help his mother, his own helplessness to put up a strong facade like his father, and perhaps most unknown to him an anger that roils inside him, an anger that is consuming him and causing him to make decisions that are not in his best interests.

He doing something we call “acting out,” when our inner torment cannot be located or articulated but it is doing its work in self-destructive behavior.

Part of his anger is watching the alienation between him and his father. More and more, they are becoming like strangers.

Jerry his angry at his father who, perhaps partly because of his grief, appears to live “like a sleepwalker going through the motions, like a puppet being maneuvered by invisible strings. Jerry felt hopeless and abandoned, all tight inside” (57).

With his mom gone, Jerry not only faces anger: he faces an overwhelming emptiness, “a yawning cavity like a hole in his chest” (58).

Does life have any meaning? Will Jerry grow up to have some boring pharmacist job like his father where he has to do the same routine forever and ever? Is life just a hell? Are the nihilistic Archies of the world right about the world being nothing but BS? If so, does anything matter? Do I even have a soul? All of these questions roil inside Jerry as anger consumes him.

Jerry is not only mad at the world; he is mad at himself for feeling so impotent and meaningless. Perhaps he joins the football team because his self-hatred demands that he punish himself. Perhaps he wants to die, to murder himself in order to terminate the anguish that vexes him.

On the nihilism spectrum, Jerry is ascending the Nihilism Ladder, with Archie, who is already a dead soul, far above him.

Six. What motivates Jerry to say no to the chocolate sale in spite of pressure from Leon and The Vigils?

Jerry associates yes with his dad, a yes man, who is a member of the walking dead. Jerry would rather “disturb the universe.”

He wants to be like those dropouts and misfits by the bus stop who seem free, not prisoners of convention and peer pressure.

He has learned, ironically enough, from Brother Leon that to comply with brutality is to be part of the brutality, so he is resisting Brother Leon’s corrupt chocolate sale and the corrupt, bullying Vigils.

The chocolate sale is corrupt evidenced by Brother Leon’s questionable purchase of Mother’s Day chocolates and his false reports of sales figures (95).

Jerry is supposed to reject sale for 10 days and then accept them as part of Vigils assignment (108). But then he defies the Vigils (140). He creates a chocolate war, with students taking sides: either sell the chocolates or resist selling them.

Jerry wonders if he rejects sale to spite Leon who tortures students like Bailey (115).

Jerry becomes hero of resistance to other classmates who praise him. More and more students come out to express their hatred of Brother Leon.

Most famously, Jerry looks at a poster “wistfully” that reads “Do I dare disturb the universe?” Translation: Do I dare rock the boat and stand up for what’s right, or do I act like a groveling coward and go along with the status quo?

The universe in question is society’s status quo, its unquestioned scripts and assume reality, which has us all groveling and running scared so that we “make it” with a maraschino cherry on top, a splendid life that we can curate on social media.

Seven. In Chapter 23, The Goober claims that evil is taking over the school. Explain.

We see that the Vigils carry out assignments that give some teachers nervous breakdowns, force them to transfer, and make cozy relationships with corrupt authority figures like Brother Leon. The official adult world of bureaucracy and administration has an unspoken relationship with the dark underworld in a mutually beneficial relationship. This secret relationship goes unquestioned and results in evil.

The relationship is such that at one point, when the chocolate sale is dragging, Leon gives this threat to Archie: Help me with chocolate sale or the Vigils are going down. Leon and the Vigils rise and fall together.

“Wrecking” Brother Eugene is the equivalent of murdering him. The system murders people. It reminds me of “Don’t hate the player; hate the game.”

The “game” would have us be groveling sycophants begging for acceptance into some tribe such as mainstream society of status and power.

The evil pertains to novel’s theme: dehumanization.

Scapegoating Rituals

Much of the novel’s dehumanization results in the tribe’s tendency to randomly pick some scapegoat for humiliation as a ritual of power that reinforces the power hierarchy of the tribe.

We see these scapegoating rituals in the short story, “The Lottery.”

In Chapter 32, we see that Jerry has become the beaten-up scapegoat, demonized, ostracized, made into The Other.

Eight. How does Archie tempt Jerry at the end of the novel, beginning in Chapter 35?

Archie wants to see Jerry resort to violence, evidence that Jerry has no self-control, evidence that Jerry is a pawn of external circumstance just like the next guy, evidence that Jerry is just another soulless animal, evidence that Jerry has no moral core, evidence that in this world there is nothing to fight for, no soul to preserve, no moral code to uphold. Life is garbage. Life is nihilism. Archie, who is dead, must have this “truth” affirmed. It is his primary psychological motivation.

Like the short story “The Lottery,” they draw randomly to see who gets to commit violence upon whom. This stage of brutality has an audience that pays for a raffle of the 50 missing boxes of chocolates.

Archie loves the bloody spectacle and its appeal. As he gleefully says, “You see, Carter, people are two things: greedy and cruel. So kid pays a buck for a chance to win a hundred. Plus fifty boxes of chocolates. The cruel part--watching two guys hitting each other, maybe hurting each other, while they’re safe in the bleachers. That’s why it works, Carter, because we’re all bastards” (231).

The bloody spectacle affirms Archie’s nihilistic worldview, so nihilistic to the core that even his boss Carter is disgusted by it.

Nine. The Goober has been morally repulsed by Trinity High School all along. Why is it important that he show up to the bloody spectacle in Chapter Thirty-Seven?

Sadly, our hero Jerry is too absorbed by grief and anger to be a moral point of view. The novel’s moral point of view actually belongs to a secondary character, The Goober, who must bear witness to the erosion of his friend’s morality as Jerry submits to violence.

He witnesses Jerry, now a broken young man on page 248, a young man broken by the “game,” the system,” saying, don’t rock the boat, play the game, do what they tell you because if you don’t, they will crush you into powder. Jerry has submitted to Archie’s nihilism, and The Goober bears witness to it.

Part One. The Novel's Darkness Results in Part from Its Characters' Lack of Free Will.

Examples:

Can you overcome your father's temper or are you doomed to have it?

If your parents are fat overeaters, are you doomed to be the same?

If your classmates cheat on the calculus exam and you resist cheating at first, will you eventually break down and join them?

If you're stalky and heavy set, can you diet and train your way to a life of svelte fitness?

If your parents are divorced, are you more likely to get a divorce?

If you live in a credit card society in which the average American is $1,6000 in credit card debt, are you doomed to be saddled with similar debt?

If your friends are all womanizers and arrogant bullies are you doomed to be the same? You've heard the saying: If you hang out with dogs, you get fleas.

Is Archie Costello doomed to live a life sequestered in arrogance, pride, and loneliness?

Is Jerry doomed to be manipulated by the tribe?

Is Brother Leon forever to be shackled by his sadistic tendencies?

Essay Strategy

If you focus on this theme in your essay, analyze the lack of free will in Jerry, Archie, Brother Leon, Obie, and Goober as it evident in the novel.

Sample Thesis:

The novel's main characters' Archie, Brother Leon, and even Jerry show they are shackled to the chains of determinism evidenced by ____________________, _______________________, ______________________, and ________________________.

Suggested Structure:

In your first page, explain the difference between free will and determinism using appropriate examples. Then in your thesis argue that free will is lacking in the novel’s characters who are beholden to psychological (irrational passions) and external determinism. The deterministic forces from which they have no free will are the lust for power, pride, corruption, revenge, the impulse to disdain the powerless, the pressure to conform, and the pressure to be obedient.

Part Two. Explaining Psychological Determinism

psychological determinism: your environment and social conditioning leave an indelible print on your personality that no degree of “free-will” can change or erase. You are a product of forces beyond your control. Also referred to as “naturalism.” The characters in the novel are slaves to compulsions that they don’t see or understand.
disaffected: the condition of being emotionally withdrawn, reserved in a condition of learned helplessness and cynicism, emotionally unreachable by the wall of defenses that were created long, long ago. We see learned helplessness in the depressed Jerry, Goober, and Archie. All 3 feel disconnected from others and in the novel all 3 betray themselves in one way or other.
Innocent child’s dream of the omniscient parent: Jerry begins to see that his father has settled for mediocrity, that he never strove to better himself and deep down he is disappointed in his father and even has contempt for him. Without a father to look up to, Jerry feels aimless.
Sadistic: taking pleasure in meanness, which is to say exacting cruelty upon others, especially the helpless. Brother Leon and Archie are examples of characters who have lost the ability to be happy except in the sick way of exacting cruelty against others. They've lost the ability to experience real pleasure and human connection and they are so isolated and self-centered that the only pleasure they can have is rooted in sadistic cruelty, inflicting suffering on others.
Post-traumatic stress disorder: depression, aggression, violence, and paranoia that results from repeated violent abuse. Sadly, we see that Goober suffers from it after doing one of the Assignments that sent Brother Eugene to the hospital.
Rite of passage; a significant event that marks the passing from innocence to initiation; dubious outsider to loyal tribal member; childhood to adulthood; placid passivity to rigorous curiosity In the novel, conformity is the rite of passage, either selling the chocolates or doing an Assignment. These displays of loyalty and obedience come with a price: Compromising one’s individual conscience.

Part Three. Psychological Determinism means certain experiences leave a permanent stamp on our identity. What forces in the environment can forever cripple us emotionally?

Abuse, the kind that Jerry and Goober suffer, results in post traumatic stress syndrome.
Rejection from a group results in a sadness and loneliness that results in withdrawal, depression, and seeking out a unconditional love from another source. Consider the lives of two baseball stars Bill Buckner and Chuck Knoblauch who now just spend time with their families. They have disappeared from the game of baseball.
Not getting unconditional love from your parents leaves a permanent hunger for love. Homeless teenagers spend their whole lives looking for unconditional love they didn’t find at home. Often I see them with dogs on the streets. There is a movie about this theme called Citizen Kane.
A teacher who humiliates you and “has it out for you” can have a permanent effect, making you distrust education, making you hostile toward school, and distrustful of authority in general.
Romantic betrayal can make you so distrustful that you make yourself ugly and throw banana peels in people’s path like a former landlady of mine who lived as a lonely miser after her fiancé dumped her for a fourteen-year-old girl and fled to Mexico.
My wife told me that victims of sexual assault commonly gain in excess of fifty to a hundred pounds because they don’t want men to get close to them. We had a neighbor at our condo who was pretty but seventy pounds overweight and owned three pit-bulls whom she spent all her time with. My wife speculated she was a victim of an assault.
Coming from divorced parents or parents living through an abusive marriage can make some children never want to get married. The statistics show that children of divorced parents have a 200 percent greater chance of getting divorced themselves.

Part Four. What forces in the environment “program” us in the deterministic sense to be more successful?

Having a family member with good social skills.
Having a family member with a strong work ethic.
Having a successful business nearby creates more traffic and more competition. For example, Starbucks makes other companies, such as Coffee Bean, more successful.
The New England Patriots are the Starbucks of football. A lot of men hate the Patriots because men hate that which threatens their power. But the powerful are effective role models.
Football was a garbage sport in the 1980s coached by rednecks with fat bellies. Not until Bill Walsh coached the 49ers in the late 1980s did all of football improve.
Being raised with diverse food at an early age gives you a more sophisticated palate. Take my wife and me. She grew up on green Jell-O and a cheese sandwiches. I grew up on authentic Mexican cooking in San Jose, California, then moved to Berkeley where I ate Thai, Indian, and other spicy cuisines. It was in my environment. It wasn’t in hers.
Determinism, obesity, and poverty: Poor people are fatter than middle class and rich people. There are many reasons for this, including the stress of poverty, which stimulates a “fat” hormone.

Part Five. Nihilism Is No Longer a “Choice” for Archie and Brother Leon

nihilism, the obliteration of right and wrong, losing any stakes in life, nothing is at stake anymore, beyond caring is the shortest definition, a sort of spiritual death where you wander the world not caring if you live or die or amount to anything. Death of a moral compass.
Anything Goes Morality or Moral relativism, make up your moral system depending on circumstances. Stealing, lying, cheating, and other immoral conduct can be rationalized under the right circumstances.
Populist Fallacy: Everyone else is doing it, so why can’t I? Brother Leon presumably sees other teachers getting kickbacks, so he “joins the party.”
Slippery slope is when your rationalizations lead to nihilism.
In nihilism you reach the point where there are no rules so that “all is permitted” or “anything goes.”
Inconsolable, learned helplessness, a sense that everything is futile so the only thing left in life is to “get yours.” In America, we have the nihilistic saying, “I’ve got mine. Get yours.”
Point of No Return, like the cop who steals drugs 1,000 times.
“Despair is not knowing it,” Kierkegaard
empathy vs. self-pity, an eternal battle
numbness, which leads to sadism, a perverted form of power in which one derives pleasure from inflicting cruelty upon others.

Part Six. Review Some of the Thesis Approaches to the Essay

Sample Thesis #1

Sample Thesis #2

The Chocolate War is a burden to read. Why. Because it's too dark, weighed down by unrelenting nihilism evidenced by _____________________, _________________, ________________, and _____________________.

Sample Thesis #3

A psychological anaylsis of Archie Costello shows his spiritual link to Satan evidenced by his protracted loneliness and solipsism; his ruthless hunger for power; his emotional dependence on sadism as a substitute for human connection; his misanthropy and self-contempt; and his self-blinding pride.

Thesis #4

The Stanford Experiment and Trinity High subject people to the dehumanization process, which includes ___________________, __________________, ______________, _______________, and _____________________.

Thesis #5

The oppressive melancholy and depression that we experience from reading the novel comes in part from seeing Jerry suffer so many types of deaths. These deaths include ____________________, _________________, __________________, __________________, and ________________________.

Part One. Lexicon:

One. Tribalism: A sense of tribal oneness that entails entitlement and a sense of superiority for the tribe and a sense of subservience and inferiority for The Other. Trinity High consists of The Vigils and the Everyone Else, Us and Them.

Two. Scapegoating, unfairly blaming the misfit or The Other, often with tragic consequences. The Vigils scapegoat anyone who does not bow down to the Vigil's power evidenced by conformity and obedience.

Three. The Bureaucratic Chain of Death: Genocide or mass slaughter is given official sanction from the state and the responsibility is distributed through a bland, unfeeling bureaucracy so that no one feels personally responsible. The Vigils give "assignments" to students. Some of these "assignments" wreak havoc and even give one teacher a nervous breakdown but the students are simply following orders.

Four. Deference to authority: You are poised to give credibility to what the authority tells you and are not inclined to resist or question the “intelligence” of that authority. For example, Americans believed in Bush’s “intelligence” that he claimed was a compelling reason for us to invade Iraq in 2003. The consequences are still with us. The chocolate sale is the work of Brother Leon, a corrupt teacher who engages in fraud, graft, kickbacks and other forms of skullduggery but is esteemed because he is an authority figure.

Five. Response to social consensus: Behaving like the Herd, conforming to the majority opinion of your society in order to share a sense of belonging and unity. Brother Leon relies on the Herd behavior for his chocolate sale to be successful.

Six. Willingness to embrace stereotypes, which means you embrace a monolithic definition of The Other when in fact groups are diverse and defy stereotypes. The Vigils demonize anyone who does not conform to their ways.

Seven. The “average” person. By average, we mean you are willing to make moral compromises to insure your security and the security of your family and your tribe. Sadly, most people are “average.” The goal of the "average" person is to be invisible by complying to the norms of society, the collective authority, even if these norms are immoral. An example is racism. If racism is widespread, a moral individual is compelled to fight it rather than go along with the immoral majority.

Eight. “Decency,” as it is commonly defined, is insufficient to repel evil in others and ourselves because too often “decency” means law-abiding, “nice,” passive, docile, malleable, and indifferent. A coward who conforms to the group is considered “decent.” Does Jerry behave decently in the novel or does he conform to the immorality of the Vigils? You'll have to decide for yourself.

Part Two. The General Causes of Nihilism in the Novel

nihilism, the obliteration of right and wrong, losing any stakes in life, nothing is at stake anymore, beyond caring is the shortest definition, a sort of spiritual death where you wander the world not caring if you live or die or amount to anything. Death of a moral compass. Jerry seems to suffer from nihilism. So does Archie. They are resigned to being helpless to evil and the lust for power.
Anything Goes Morality or Moral relativism, make up your moral system depending on circumstances. Stealing, lying, cheating, and other immoral conduct can be rationalized under the right circumstances. Archie is the supreme master of rationalizations. He never takes responsibility for his own actions. He always has excuses.
Populist Fallacy: Everyone else is doing it, so why can’t I? Students see other students doing the "assignments" so they feel that it's okay to do them.
Slippery slope is when your rationalizations lead to nihilism. Once you rationalize a small thing, like stealing a fruit juice at work, why not take a few twenty dollar bills out of the cash register?
The fear of having no rules so that “all is permitted” or “anything goes.” We need boundaries. This is the theme of the beloved classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Inconsolable, learned helplessness, a sense that everything is futile: In Chinese:mai ban fa: “Nothing can be done.” This is the emotional state of Jerry about his life.
Point of No Return; Archie's contempt for others, and himself, is so strong that one wonders if he can ever return to any kind of sympathy for the human race.
numbness, which leads to sadism, a perverted form of power in which one derives pleasure from inflicting cruelty upon others. Brother Leon loves to play sadistic games with the students such as Bailey when he calls this outstanding student a "cheater and a liar."
Nihilism happens to people who don't know it.

Part Three. What are Archie’s values and how do those values connect to nihilism?

See Chapter 2, page 8. In a way, Archie is the novel’s Satan. For Archie, there is no truth, only BS, and some BS is better than other BS. That is the measure of things: the quality of one’s BS. Nihilism means there is no truth and therefore no lie. All is B.S. Therefore, all is the same. People who embrace the B.S. Principle inevitably succumb to nihilism.
Archie prides himself as being beyond the norm, beyond the herd, beyond conventional morality. He is better than everyone and as such he is mired in intellectual pride. Archie sees himself as the supreme psychologist who can penetrate and manipulate anyone. Yet he is the butt of his own joke in that he lives in interminable isolation and anhedonia. While he is full of bluster and braggadocio, there is an underlying sadness and loneliness that afflicts Archie and in the end it suffuses him with a sense of nihilism and hopelessness.
Archie is a determinist. He doesn’t believe people have free will to exercise moral goodness or self-transformation. His “assignments” are designed to show how helpless people are in order to confirm Archie’s deterministic worldview. He lives to re-affirm his pessimism. His nihilistic pessimism is embodied in the statement “Life is shit.” Such a statement is evidence of nihilism.
Reinforcing Archie’s nihilistic pessimism, he sees all adults, including Brother Leon, as frightened children wearing an adult wax mask, which melts rather easily, upon the slightest provocation. The corrupt and cowardly Leon underscores Archie’s belief in nihilism, that the world is a hopeless and meaningless place. Brother Leon poses another nihilistic vision to Archie: Leon is both sadistic and helpless before his own sycophantic cowardice. He is also corrupt.
Archie’s complete absence of self-respect also contributes to his nihilism. Archie prides himself in his powerful role, yet he has no self-respect because in part he knows he is a man with no integrity. He plays the game just like everyone else. Deep down, he knows he sold his soul to the Devil. He is overcome with self-disgust, for he knows his own actions are vile.
Archie’s misanthropy (hating the human race) also contributes to his misanthropy. See the opening of Chapter 5. His sour attitude toward life is further reinforced by his belief that he is a genius surrounded by a “confederacy of dunces,” idiots who cannot appreciate his scintillating assignments.
Archie’s daily observation of human cowardice and conformity contribute to his nihilism. For example, every day he sees some scared, groveling student obeying the Vigils’ Assignments. No one stands up to the Vigils, evidencing the spineless student body whom Archie has contempt for.
The faculty’s unspoken tolerance of the Vigils reinforces Archie’s nihilism because he knows the faculty stands for nothing. They tolerate the Vigils because the Vigils have power and the Vigils’ control of the students is to the school’s advantage. This is analogous to prison guards and the wardens who tolerate gang leaders, shot-callers, controlling the inmates. In the end, it isn’t about values; it’s about power. And a world that worships power with no values is a nihilistic world.

Part Four. Sample of thesis statements that focus on argument

The Chocolate War is a dark novel collapsing under the author's extreme nihilistic vision, which proves unrealistic by focusing on exaggerated condition of helplessness, violence, gullibility, and the hunger for conformity.

Claims that The Chocolate War's nihilistic

Part One. Spiritual Death in the Novel

The Chocolate War is about the different types of deaths we face when we compromise our individual conscience for power, conformity, and corruption, as Jerry does throughout the novel. One type of death Jerry suffers is the death of the identity of himself that he values:

His image of self as being courageous is gone for he realizes he is a coward who is manipulated by Archie to fight, not out of courage, but by pressure to defend his “manhood” and by revenge.
His image as a compassionate man is gone as he sees he can be calloused and apathetic, a slave to the barbarian tribal code, as he participates in the final fight.
His image as a moral man is gone during the fight when he sees his dead mother casting an admonishing gaze upon him, showing that he has betrayed her, by betraying the values she taught him.
His image as being loyal to his mother is gone as he realizes pride and self-preservation triumphs over all other interests.

Thus the novel is dealing with the death of the self, in a spiritual or psychological sense, much more than it is dealing with physical death.

Part Three: Today’s Essay Variation:

Jerry is a complex character. He is neither simply heroic, worthy of our sympathy and admiration nor simply a “failure,” worthy of our scorn and contempt. Argue that Jerry’s moral complexities defy simple analysis with a thesis that might look like this:

Jerry is a sympathetic character full of moral contradictions that include ______________________, __________________, __________________, and _______________________________.

Some moral complexities of Jerry:

One. He sees the futility and mediocrity of his father’s spineless, complacent existence but fails to see that his father deals with his wife’s death by withdrawing.

Two. Jerry is wise to see the folly of becoming complacent to a life of conforming mediocrity like his father, but then he conforms to violence and the “man code” by participating in the fight at the end of the novel.

Three. Jerry is bold to defy the chocolate sale, Brother Leon and the Vigils, but one could argue that it’s not his free will that is doing the defiance, merely the depression from losing his mother. Less depressed, would he conform like everyone else?

Four. Jerry sees the malignancy that roils beneath Trinity High and the Vigils but he capitulates to the psychological warfare of Archie.

Part Four. Archie Is a Satanic Figure

One. Like Satan, Archie is full of pride and has blind faith that his superior intellect gives him the upper hand with others.

Two. Like Satan, Archie has contempt for the human race ("We're all bastards," he says in the novel). Having contempt means you believe every person has a price and that every person enjoys watching the humiliation and failure of others. This is called schadenfreude.

Three. Like Satan, Archie lives in eternal exile, apart from the human race. Archie is insufferably lonely and disconnected from others he attempts to compensate for his misery by exercising power.

Four. Like Satan, Archie is so proudful that he'd rather rule in hell that serve in heaven. That is to say, he prefers to live in his lonely world and marinate in his self-centered existence.

Five. Like Satan, Archie is the master of rationalization and manipulation. He can pull BS out of his you know what to trick others and suck them into his schemes.

Six. Like Satan, Archie easily rejects moral absolutes and moral values because he rationalizes that he is superior to others and thus lives beyond the moral sphere. Morality doesn't apply to him. What does? Moral relativism. You make up whatever morality you want depending on the circumstances.

Part Five. The Difference Between a General and a Specific Thesis. It's the Difference Between a Failed and Successful Essay.

A general thesis is too broad, too blah, and has a limp lackluster quality.

A specific thesis is razor-sharp in its focus, fiery, and sometimes argumentative.

Examples of a General Thesis

The Chocolate War is a deterministic novel.

Determinism imbues the novel's characters.

The characters cannot escape determinism and are doomed to a life without free will.

More Specific Thesis Statements Addressing Determinism

The Chocolate War affords us a dark vision of the world, one stripped of free will and taken over by determinism. This unforgiving determinism is the result of _________, __________, ___________, and ___________.

General Thesis Examples

A world of determinism can never rise above the despair of nihilism.

Nihilism is the novel's major mood and produces the novel's major theme.

The novel's characters cannot escape nihilism.

Improved Thesis Statement Addressing Nihilism

The novel's nihilism comes from Cormier's pessimistic view of human nature, which can be characterized by __________, ____________, __________, and _______________.

General Thesis Examples

Archie is Satan.

Archie's supercilious air makes him a satanic figure.

Archie has a devilish way about him.

Archie's devilish manner makes him repulsive.

More Specific Thesis That Addresses Archie's Satanic Aspects

While not devil's equal, we can see that Archie's psychology has many qualities in common with that Fallen Angel Lucifer. The most striking similarities include __________, __________, ______________, and _____________.

Part Six. Putting All the Essay Topics on One Post

Essay Topic One.

Tribalism, Symbiosis, Obedience to Authority, Conformity, Determinism, and Individual Conscience in The Chocolate War

In page one, analyze the forces in the novel that would compel us to call it a “dark vision of the human condition.” Some people might call this dark vision the condition of nihilism.

Then in the second page, start your thesis paragraph in which you connect the themes to the dangers of obedience as it relates to power, authority, and symbiosis. Because this is your multiple-source research paper, you will need to connect the novel’s themes to themes outside the text. You may, for example, look at the theme of obedience in the context of Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments or the abuse of power in the Stanford Experiment.

A thesis might look like this: The Chocolate War shows the demands of tribalism, which compromises our humanity by ________________________, _____________________________, _________________________, and _______________________________.

In your final page, you will write about how you or someone you know had a conflict between individual conscience and conformity during a “peer pressure” situation that revealed the “tiger’s claw of tribalism.” You conclusion will tie in your personal account with your novel analysis.

Your body paragraphs will correspond to the components you use to fill in the above blanks. Your conclusion will be one sentence, a brief, dramatic restatement of your thesis. Your final page, your Works Cited page, will show the sources you used from The Chocolate War, from my blog, from interviews, or from other helpful sources you find. Your Works Cited page and manuscript must conform to MLA format. Be sure to make your own catchy, creative title.

Essay Topic Two

One Way of Approaching the Essay Assignment (If I Were Writing It)

In my first page, I would write about a time I compromised my humanity by conforming to some unwritten law, like the time I fought Ron Reynolds because he had said something in PE that had insulted me. I wasn’t really mad, but punched him to “defend my honor,” then felt guilty afterwards.

In my second page, I’d argue that The Chocolate War is about the dehumanization that occurs from power, conformity, and blind obedience. In my body paragraphs I’d show how Jerry, Goober, Brother Leon, and Archie compromised their humanity through blind obedience and the worship of power. In the process, I’d compare these characters to the awful truths learned in the Milgram and Stanford Experiments.

Essay Topic Three

Essay Variation Based on Determinism:

Analyze the lack of free will in Jerry, Archie, Brother Leon, Obie, and Goober as it evident in the novel.

Suggested Structure: In your first page, explain the difference between free will and determinism using appropriate example. Then in your thesis argue that free will is lacking in the novel’s characters who are beholden to psychological (irrational passions) and external determinism. The deterministic forces from which they have no free will are the lust for power, pride, corruption, revenge, the impulse to disdain the powerless, the pressure to conform, and the pressure to be obedient.

Essay Topic Four.

The Chocolate War is about the different types of deaths we face when we compromise our individual conscience for power, conformity, and corruption, as several characters do throughout the novel.

Essay Topic Five.

Jerry is a sympathetic character full of moral contradictions that include ______________________, __________________, __________________, and _______________________________.

Essay Topic Six.

Analyze the psychological warfare that Archie uses throughout the novel. Here are some things to consider: Why is he effective at manipulating others? How does he use psychology over brute force to assert his power? What nihilistic assumptions does he make about human nature in order to exploit others?

Essay Topic Seven.

Compare and contrast the evil evident in Archie and Brother Leon throughout the novel. Which character is more evil and why?

Essay Topic Eight:

This essay was generated from two students who didn't "connect" with the other essay options:

Compare Archie and Brother Leon's character flaws. Consider the following: cowardice, sadism, nihilism, and intellectual pride (leading to blindness).

Part Five. Journal Entry

Of the several topics, which one interests you the most and why.

Part Six. Research Paper Sources for your Works Cited Page

Adolescent Literature

Alienation in The Chocolate War

Bryan-Chocolate War

The book's nihilism offends a school, which wants a petition to ban it!

The Chocolate War: Still Tasting Good

Why The Chocolate War Was Banned

LSU Faculty

Chocolate War Resource Guide

Part One. What is the dehumanization process that encourages those in power (teachers, the Vigils) to become more cruel and ruthless in their imposition of power against their subjects (students)?

Example: Chapter 6: Brother Leon is bored with his life and feels the need to terrify one of the "weaker" students for his own delectation and sick sadistic pleasure.

Brother Leon uses false logic in the form of a false syllogism to accuse Bailey of cheating.

Bailey, why do you cheat?
Bailey earns straight A's.
A's are a sign of perfection.
Only God is perfect.
Bailey can't be God and enjoy God's perfection.
Therefore, Bailey is a cheater and a liar.

There is also an example of the "Brain Tie."

Sometimes it works the other way around with the students abusing the teacher.

The spit wad incident for the teacher with PTSD.
The fat teacher who got stuck in the supply closet while getting the overhead projector.

Sometimes students bully and/or demonize another student:

How does this dehumanization process happen?

One. Strip a man of all his belongings, including clothes is powerful symbolically because his complete nakedness represents complete helplessness and powerlessness to both himself and the Vigils. In prison, they guards strip the prisoners of their clothes. While not as extreme, the Vigils do take the students to their hideout where the students are rendered helpless and in a way are “naked.”

Two. The Vigils will humiliate the students, explaining that they are losers who can only redeem themselves by fulfilling the Assignments.

Three. Impose strict rules, which must be rigidly enforced to keep a sharp dividing line between the powerful and the powerless: There are rituals of “respect” that must be maintained lest the students suffer the Vigils’ wrath. We see strict, arbitrary rules in hazing rituals.

Four. The dehumanization can only occur in mutual interdependence and cooperation: a cruel symbiosis between Vigils and students. This symbiosis is also evident between teachers and students when Brother Leon plays a humiliation game on Bailey (“Why do you cheat?”) and when the students go along with it, Leon says the whole class, a bunch of passive cowards, turned into Nazi Germany.

Five. The students mean nothing in the face of the Vigils’ power. The Vigils make the students perform Assignments, which are really exercises in self-abnegation.

Six. The Vigils’ strip the students of their masculinity by the Assignments, which are a reminder of who has all the power and who must be obedient.

Seven. Disobedience to the group will lead to being shunned, ostracized, demonized, and worse. Jerry will be punished for defying the Vigils. He can only refuse the chocolates under the Vigils’ order, but not on his own.

Eight. The Vigils make the students perform tedious acts that remind the students that they are insignificant, less human and more animal.

Nine. Reinforce power by assigning arbitrary, meaningless tasks and gratuitous acts of humiliation. Look again to the Assignment in which a screwdriver is used to unscrew everything in one of the teachers’ rooms. The Goober does it without question, but then is overcome with guilt for the effect it has on the teacher who has a nervous breakdown.

Part Two. Analyze the sadistic dynamics between “captors and captives” in Chapters 5 and 6 with the Stanford Experiment. Consider the process of dehumanization.

Goober is less human and more like “Vigil bait.”
Archie prides himself on being able to “build a house next door,” come up with a quick solution for the Vigils, but he can’t find a solution to his own misery, his own personal sense that he’s lacking in humanity. He also feels a sense of “self-disgust,” especially when he’s performing an Assignment, interrogating a student.
The interrogating takes place in a windowless room with guards and a bare light bulb. It’s essentially a prison cell.
“Tell me why you’re here.” What does this establish? Who’s in charge, who’s got the power. Obedience.
Archie tells Goober the Assignment isn’t personal, which shows the depersonalization or dehumanization of the subject performing the Assignment.
The Goober passively accepts the Assignment. It is “doom,” something inescapable, no student has been able to fight against it.
In Chapter 6, Brother Leon takes delight in humiliating Bailey, one of his best students, by accusing him of being a cheater. The scene underscores the powerful and the powerless.

Part Three. One Way of Approaching the Essay Assignment (If I Were Writing It)

Or I'd write about the constant demonization of Tasmanian Devil.

In my second page, I’d argue that The Chocolate War is about the dehumanization that occurs from power, conformity, and blind obedience. In my body paragraphs I’d show how Jerry, Goober, Brother Leon, and Archie compromised their humanity through blind obedience and the worship of power. In the process, I’d compare these characters to the awful truths learned in the Milgram and Stanford Experiments.

In my final page, I'd write about someone who heroically performed an act of noble disobedience.

Part Six. In-Class Exercise

Write about a personal experience you had where the abuse of power resulted in the loss of someone’s humanity. You could write about a bully, a cruel teacher who humiliates students, or some authority figure. Or you could write about how you exercised power in a way that you made feel regretful and guilty afterwards. You could use this anecdote for the first page of your essay.

Example of an "A" Introduction, Transition, and Thesis

It was late in the afternoon, a couple of hours after Rich Drakos had made so much money at the Kissing Booth, that I witnessed my first piece of evidence that for all his good looks and popularity something wasn’t quite right with him. I was on my way to use the gym locker bathroom, for after school it tended to be relatively abandoned and afforded me more privacy than the bathroom by the classroom corridors, when I saw Rich and another girl outside the gym’s back door. They were unaware of me as I passed them by, which was a good thing, since they were absorbed in a marathon session of French-kissing. Seeing Rich smooch with another girl wasn’t my first clue that something was wrong with him. Rather, it was his choice of girl. It’s hard to describe her without sounding insensitive, if not a bit cruel. First let me say I don’t remember her real name. I only remember what the boys, myself included, called her—Tasmanian Devil. It was a very cruel name indeed. It captured the horror she instilled in us. She was a hulk of a girl, no smaller than our football team’s offensive linemen, with an oversized head, long, black stringy hair, a snout for a nose, and those unfortunate fleshy cheeks that seem to push against the eyes so that they are barely visible. Now what made Tasmanian Devil particularly frightening was that she was not, like the other homely girls, particularly apologetic about her unsightly appearance. Nor was she particularly smart, a claim reinforced by rumors that she took special classes for slow learners. On football Fridays when we had a home game, she was especially scary because she would show up to school wearing a pink mini skirt, white stockings, and a thick application of bright makeup. These measures did not diminish her dreadfulness. To the contrary, her “dressing up” only exacerbated her ugliness the way one might, by picking and popping a pimple, cause it to inflame.

Now for the record I need to make it clear that my sense of decency had stopped me from calling her Tasmanian Devil after seeing her sitting alone in the bleachers during a football game a few weeks before. It was raining that night and my friends and I were snugly close to each other protecting ourselves with our many umbrellas. We were full of adolescent exuberance, joking, laughing, slapping each other on the back. Twenty yards away Tasmanian Devil sat all alone, no one closer than thirty feet from her. She had no umbrella. Rain poured on her sodden hair, which clung to her wet forehead. Mascara ran down her face and reminded me of blood. But she appeared to be completely indifferent to the fact that she was getting more and more soaked. She was withdrawn into herself and there was a despondence in her expression as if she knew, in that moment, that she would be fated to a life-sentence of loneliness and ridicule.

And so you can imagine how disconcerted I was, two weeks later, to see Rich French-kissing her behind the gym. He couldn’t have been attracted to her. He had to be playing a sadistic game: First, giving her a taste of something forbidden, then denying it from her, and then watching the powerful, devastating effects of that denial.

Tasmanian Devil was submitted into a mental institution a month later during Christmas vacation. I never knew her exact diagnosis but it was rumored that she would without warning erupt into violent fits in which she would babble Rich’s name over and over while being forced into a straitjacket and being injected with a variety of anti-psychotic drugs.

This type of sadistic behavior, with no regard to the victims' long-term suffering is evident in the dark novel The Chocolate War, which focuses on the causes of dehumanization. These causes include __________, _________, __________, and _______________.

Part One. The Best Thesis Statements are Usually Argumentative

Sample of thesis statements that focus on argument

The Chocolate War is a dark novel collapsing under the author's extreme nihilistic vision, which proves unrealistic by focusing on exaggerated condition of helplessness, violence, gullibility, and people’s hunger for conformity.

Claims that The Chocolate War's nihilist vision are exaggerated are delusional. The world is rife with examples of nihilism that make The Chocolate War seem like a children’s book. If anything, The Chocolate War suffers from being too tame, too kind, and too restrained in its depiction of adolescent cruelty and adult corruption.

While many students have attacked McMahon for choosing The Chocolate War, a book, they claim, that is bogged down in depression and helplessness, I defend McMahon adamantly. For it is apparent that McMahon choose this tautly written masterpiece because of the wisdom it contains, not the least of which is its salient depiction of Archie Costello, a smart young man who becomes a victim of his own pride. The connection between his interminable isolation and his pride is evidenced by __________________________, ____________________________, _____________________, and __________________________.

Part Two. Nihilism in the Novel

To suffer from the condition of nihilism means you’ve given up on the idea of right and wrong, free will (the free will to exercise individual conscience over the demands of the tribe), and reciprocity (treating people the way you’d like to be treated) for a better society. As a result, you’ve surrendered to the paralysis of self-pity and learned helplessness and see yourself as a victim at the mercy of powers larger than you.

There are two types of nihilists in the world, those who know they’re nihilists and those who don’t know. Most nihilists don’t know they are.

Most people slowly surrender to nihilism and become helpless to the point that it is often too late.

Two examples: A doctor who obsessed over his ex-wife taking the furniture from his million-dollar home and the woman who never recovered from her fiancé cheating on her two days before her planned wedding.

In contrast, Archie Costello knows he’s a nihilist. He believes everyone, including himself, is bad and cowardly at their core. He sees himself as superior to others because he at least has the courage to recognize that he is a horrible person, a mere puppet in the world’s power play. He knows that no matter how many people he is manipulating, there is always someone above him who manipulates him. His worldview makes him bitter and full of contempt and self-disgust, a condition he attempts to allay by inflicting cruel games on others.

Part Three. The Causes of Nihilism in the Novel

1. nihilism, the obliteration of right and wrong, losing any stakes in life, nothing is at stake anymore, beyond caring is the shortest definition, a sort of spiritual death where you wander the world not caring if you live or die or amount to anything. Death of a moral compass. Jerry seems to suffer from nihilism. So does Archie. They are resigned to being helpless to evil and the lust for power.

2. Anything Goes Morality or Moral relativism, make up your moral system depending on circumstances. Stealing, lying, cheating, and other immoral conduct can be rationalized under the right circumstances. Archie is the supreme master of rationalizations. He never takes responsibility for his own actions. He always has excuses.

3. Populist Fallacy: Everyone else is doing it, so why can’t I? Students see other students doing the "assignments" so they feel that it's okay to do them.

5. The fear of having no rules so that “all is permitted” or “anything goes.” We need boundaries. This is the theme of the beloved classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

6. Inconsolable, learned helplessness, a sense that everything is futile: In Chinese:mai ban fa: “Nothing can be done.” This is the emotional state of Jerry about his life.

7. Point of No Return; Archie's contempt for others, and himself, is so strong that one wonders if he can ever return to any kind of sympathy for the human race.

8. numbness, which leads to sadism, a perverted form of power in which one derives pleasure from inflicting cruelty upon others. Brother Leon loves to play sadistic games with the students such as Bailey when he calls this outstanding student a "cheater and a liar."

9. Nihilism is a form of self-pity and learned helplessness.

10. Nihilism is the product of not loving something larger than yourself.

11. The long-term effect of nihilism is anhedonia, the inability to experience happiness or joy.

Part Four. What are Archie’s values and how do those values connect to nihilism?

1. See Chapter 2, page 8. In a way, Archie is the novel’s Satan. For Archie, there is no truth, only BS, and some BS is better than other BS. That is the measure of things: the quality of one’s BS. Nihilism means there is no truth and therefore no lie. All is B.S. Therefore, all is the same. People who embrace the B.S. Principle inevitably succumb to nihilism.

2. Archie prides himself as being beyond the norm, beyond the herd, beyond conventional morality. He is better than everyone and as such he is mired in intellectual pride. Archie sees himself as the supreme psychologist who can penetrate and manipulate anyone. Yet he is the butt of his own joke in that he lives in interminable isolation and anhedonia. While he is full of bluster and braggadocio, there is an underlying sadness and loneliness that afflicts Archie and in the end it suffuses him with a sense of nihilism and hopelessness.

3. Archie is a determinist. He doesn’t believe people have free will to exercise moral goodness or self-transformation. His “assignments” are designed to show how helpless people are in order to confirm Archie’s deterministic worldview. He lives to re-affirm his pessimism. His nihilistic pessimism is embodied in the statement “Life is shit.” Such a statement is evidence of nihilism.

4. Reinforcing Archie’s nihilistic pessimism, he sees all adults, including Brother Leon, as frightened children wearing an adult wax mask, which melts rather easily, upon the slightest provocation. The corrupt and cowardly Leon underscores Archie’s belief in nihilism, that the world is a hopeless and meaningless place. Brother Leon poses another nihilistic vision to Archie: Leon is both sadistic and helpless before his own sycophantic cowardice. He is also corrupt.

5. Archie’s complete absence of self-respect also contributes to his nihilism. Archie prides himself in his powerful role, yet he has no self-respect because in part he knows he is a man with no integrity. He plays the game just like everyone else. Deep down, he knows he sold his soul to the Devil. He is overcome with self-disgust, for he knows his own actions are vile.

6. Archie’s misanthropy (hating the human race) also contributes to his misanthropy. See the opening of Chapter 5. His sour attitude toward life is further reinforced by his belief that he is a genius surrounded by a “confederacy of dunces,” idiots who cannot appreciate his scintillating assignments.

7. Archie’s daily observation of human cowardice and conformity contribute to his nihilism. For example, every day he sees some scared, groveling student obeying the Vigils’ Assignments. No one stands up to the Vigils, evidencing the spineless student body whom Archie has contempt for.

8. The faculty’s unspoken tolerance of the Vigils reinforces Archie’s nihilism because he knows the faculty stands for nothing. They tolerate the Vigils because the Vigils have power and the Vigils’ control of the students is to the school’s advantage. This is analogous to prison guards and the wardens who tolerate gang leaders, shot-callers, controlling the inmates. In the end, it isn’t about values; it’s about power. And a world that worships power with no values is a nihilistic world.

Part Five: In-Class Activity

Write a one-paragraph profile of someone you know who surrendered to nihilism. If you like your profile, you may use it as an introduction for your essay.

Part One. Lexicon:

Part One. The Best Thesis Statements are Usually Argumentative

Sample of thesis statements that focus on argument

While many students have attacked McMahon for choosing The Chocolate War, a book, they claim, that is bogged down in depression and helplessness, I defend McMahon adamantly. For it is apparent that McMahon chose this tautly written masterpiece because of the wisdom it contains, not the least of which is its salient depiction of Archie Costello, a smart young man who becomes a victim of his own pride. The connection between his interminable isolation and his pride is evidenced by __________________________, ____________________________, _____________________, and __________________________.

Part Two. Nihilism in the Novel

To suffer from the condition of nihilism means you’ve given up on the idea of right and wrong; you've given up on yourself; you've given up on others; you've given up on life.

We all wrestle with nihilism, but there is a difference between struggling with nihilism and completely surrendering to it.

When you're a real nihilist, you've lost your free will (the free will to exercise individual conscience over the demands of the tribe),

you've lost the capacity for emotional reciprocity (treating people the way you’d like to be treated) for a better society.

As a result, you’ve surrendered to the paralysis of self-pity and learned helplessness and see yourself as a victim at the mercy of powers larger than you.

Nihilism is a disease and it is the cause and condition of "giving up on life."

In life, the two most important questions are "Have you given up on life?" and "Are you pissing away your life on nonsense?"

In The Chocolate War all the characters are nihilists. They have given up on life. To give up on life means 3 things: You've given up on yourself, you've given up on people, and you've rejected life itself.

This is the most common disease of the human race. The question that is at the root of most human mental diseases is has the person given up on life?

If you have children, you can't be a nihilist. That would be too much of a luxury. You can't have children and go around with the attitude "I suck, people suck, and the world sucks."

On a personal note, while I struggle with nihilism, I am not in my heart of hearts a nihilist; otherwise, I would be content teaching nihilism to my daughters, but instead I teach them books about ethics, right and wrong, and life-affirmation. I don't want my daughters to be nihilists; therefore, I am not a true nihilist.

The way out of nihilism isn't going into your past and unearthing your bad childhood. The way out is to look into the future and find a purpose. No one in The Chocolate War has a purpose. All motives are based on "I've given up on myself" or "I've given up on the possibility of a Higher Self." In the latter position, characters like Archie don't believe in the possibility of a Higher Self; the "purpose" in life is to embrace your cynical animal and outsmart your competition.

There are two types of nihilists in the world, those who know they’re nihilists and those who don’t know. Most nihilists don’t know they are.

Most people slowly surrender to nihilism and become helpless to the point that it is often too late.

Two examples:

A doctor obsessed over his ex-wife taking the furniture from his million-dollar home

A woman never recovered from her fiancé cheating on her two days before her planned wedding.

Part Three. The Causes of Nihilism in the Novel

3. Populist Fallacy: Everyone else is doing it, so why can’t I? Students see other students doing the "assignments" so they feel that it's okay to do them. You're working in a store and all the co-workers take food and beverages without paying so you think it's okay.

4. Slippery slope is when your rationalizations lead to nihilism. Once you rationalize a small thing, like stealing a fruit juice at work, why not take a few twenty dollar bills out of the cash register? Evil knows no compromise. For example, your girlfriend is traveling and you by chance bump into an ex at a club and you dance for "old time sake." Does it end there?

5. The fear of having no rules so that “all is permitted” or “anything goes.” We need boundaries. This is the theme of the beloved classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. In The Chocolate War, the students and Brother Leon, have no boundaries.