The Chocolate War

Archie is the novel’s key antagonist in the student body. He is a villain and fits the archetype of the mastermind, which makes him the locus for the theme of The Dynamics of Power and Control, as well as the instigator of the actual power struggle within the narrative. As “The Assigner” of the Vigils, he devises the assignments the group uses to control the student body through intimidation and fear. Archie delights in his role and the cruelties it allows him to indulge. He has an “uncanny” ability to “dazzle you with his brilliance” (10). When the third-person omniscient narrative focuses on Archie’s perspective, he is often self-congratulatory and gloating. He takes delight in other students’ hatred toward him: “It was good to have people hate you—it kept you sharp. And when you put the needle in them [...], you didn’t have to worry about your conscience” (136). This remorseless self-awareness emphasizes his villain status; he understands the humiliation he inflicts and enjoys it.

Archie loves chocolate and power. These two symbols align him with the similarly villainous Brother Leon and his chocolate sale. His hunger for sweetness ironically mirrors the bitterness his power plays evoke. However, he loathes the physicality associated with conventional exertions of power, and the smell and even the concept of sweat make him feel ill. As a mastermind, he employs psychological manipulation to get other students, like Emile Janza, to carry out physical bullying on his behalf. They also set him apart from the other students who are willing to get physical and participate in school sports. This signals his feelings of superiority and untouchability.

His repetition of the phrase “I am Archie” like a mantra of contempt for others, suggests a satisfying catharsis at the end when his arrogance will surely become his undoing in the novel’s resolution. This does not happen. In most young adult novels, characters like Archie are defeated in the end. However, when Archie coolly pulls two white marbles from the black box before the boxing match, Cormier signals that not even the law of averages can defeat Archie’s cruelty and ability to think three steps ahead, to build “the house nobody could anticipate a need for, except himself, a house that was invisible to everyone else” (31). By pulling off the raffle at the boxing match and even putting Brother Leon in his debt by selling all the chocolates, Archie builds himself a big fine house whose foundation is the satisfaction he gleans from the emotional torment of his peers and the physical annihilation of Jerry Renault, who represents resistance.

Brother Leon is the secondary antagonist of the novel. Because he is described as “venomous” and he represents every student’s worst assumption about teachers and their motivations, it would be easy to classify him in the archetype of the “pure evil” villain. After he extorts a student with a failing test grade, the student wonders, “Were teachers as corrupt as the villains you read about in books or saw in movies and television?” (107). Jerry thinks about his “glimpse into the hell that was burning inside the teacher” (116). Such descriptions suggest that he is something purely evil. He could be placed as an archetypal bully villain. He is no one’s friend, though he and Archie are aligned in their love of power and manipulation, as well as their enmity toward Jerry Renault. Leon takes pleasure in humiliating his students, but like an archetypal bully, he punches down. He chooses shy, well-behaved students to torment. After accusing a student named Bailey of cheating, Leon ensures his safety from reproach by gaslighting the witnesses. He lectures his victim’s classmates for not standing up for him and compares them to Nazis. Like Archie, Leon’s strategy for controlling the student body is to rule through fear, under the divide-and-conquer principle.

However, his true archetype is revealed through his motivations. As acting Headmaster, Brother Leon intends to use the annual chocolate sale to make a name for himself and get the position permanently. His hunger for power is such that he has misappropriates school funds to buy chocolates for the sale, which puts him in the position of asking for help from The Vigils. While many other teachers have tacitly allowed the group’s scheming, Leon is the first to acknowledge them openly, saying the name of the group aloud. His demands that they make the chocolate sale a success and his decision to allow the “raffle” organized by Archie to continue signals his ultimate corruption. He is unable to see his culpability because he belongs to the archetype of the fanatical villain. His quest for glory outweighs any pull of conscience.

Emile is always spoiling for a fight; when he siphons gas from another student’s car, he is disappointed at not being caught, because he is hoping for a confrontation. He is a foil to Archie—though both are villains, Emile represents the physical and animalistic elements of cruelty that Archie disdains, and Archie frequently calls him “an animal.” Emile is an example of the bully archetype within the villain character type. He and Archie disgust each other. Each is mildly afraid of the methods the other uses to manipulate those around them—like Archie, Emile uses his power to frighten students into doing his bidding for his amusement, such as when he makes a boy buy him cigarettes so the boy will be tardy.

Emile believes Archie has a photograph of him masturbating in the school bathroom. Archie can extort Emile to act as his tool of intimidation. He tasks Emile with beating up Jerry, and Emile takes the task a bit too far, enlisting a whole group of students to help with the beating. Thus, it is predictable that when Archie convinces Emile to participate in the boxing match with Jerry, he will again take it too far. His unthinking violence toward Jerry in the boxing ring is simply another weapon in Archie’s arsenal, and as a flat and archetypal bully, Emile does what is expected of him.

Roland Goubert is a deuteragonist. He is Jerry Renault’s football teammate and only friend, The Goober is the first student who gets an “assignment” from The Vigils. Goober represents The Moral Complexities of Resistance and Conformity—he is reluctant to carry out his assignment to loosen all the screws in the furniture of Room Nineteen, and after the consequences cause Brother Eugene to take a leave from Trinity, he feels disgusted with himself. As Jerry’s war with The Vigils and Brother Leon intensifies, The Goober becomes even more disgusted with the school, calling it “rotten.” He quits football and tells Jerry he won’t give any more of himself to Trinity, though he encourages Jerry to sell the chocolates to avoid more bullying.

The Goober also represents conscience in the novel and the ineffectuality of having a conscience in the world of this prep school. His efforts to stand in solidarity with Jerry by ceasing to participate in the chocolate sale are undermined when The Vigils give him credit for their sales, but he knows “his days at Trinity would be numbered if he walked into that group of jubilant guys and told them to erase the fifty beside his name” (197). As a result, he feels cowardly and traitorous, which makes him physically ill and absent from school in the final days of the sale. The Goober’s illness and Jerry’s beating together represent the physical consequences of the moral rot at the heart of Trinity.

The name is associated with ceremonial rituals and keeping watch. The Vigils are the secretive group that maintains the status quo and order among the student body through bullying. They represent the power of tradition, manipulation, and authority. “Without The Vigils, Trinity might have been torn apart like other schools had been, by demonstrations, protests, all that crap” (27). Though their existence is unsanctioned by the school, and they seldom commit violence, they rule through fear, handing out “assignments” to the younger students for questionable purposes. After Archie, Obie and Carter are the most powerful Vigils; both of the henchmen hate Archie but recognize his power, so they seek to challenge and undermine him in small ways. Carter, the “muscle,” interrupts one of Archie’s assignment sessions with a violent outburst that gains approval from the group’s other members, and Obie, the “errand boy,” continually finds ways to point out the shortcomings in Archie’s leadership. Their most significant effort comes at the end of the novel, when they attempt to undo him by presenting the black box at the boxing match—forcing Archie to confront his greatest fears: a threat to his control and a physical fight.