Sep

3

Back To School: The Cheese Stands Alone.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

September 3, 2007 |

This fall students going into high school or even middle school may be assigned to read one of two books: The Chocolate War or I Am The Cheese. Both books are by Robert Cormier. Born on January 17th, 1925, Cormier passed away on November 2nd, 2000, and left a legacy of some of the most disturbing books in young adult literature.

The Chocolate War, set in a Catholic high school, is about a young man who defies the school’s tradition of selling chocolate bars to raise money. At first it’s a prank he’s put up to by The Vigils, a secret school fraternity, but when he defies them and decides on his own to continue refusing to sell chocolate bars he becomes a school outcast. It’s a dark story of the evils of group-think, foreshadowed early in the book by a teacher’s lecture on Nazi Germany. Ironically this is the same teacher who organizes the annual chocolate bar sale.

I Am The Cheese is stranger, darker, and much more complex. While The Chocolate War seems like a simple moral tale about not following the crowd, I Am The Cheese is about fourteen year-old Adam Farmer whose solitariness is forced, not chosen. He learns that his parents are different; his family is strangely sheltered and limits its circle of friends to only a close few because their whole life is a fiction, for a deeply disturbing reason. The title actually comes from the final lines of the children’s song “The Farmer In The Dell”.

Although it’s less well-known, Cormier also wrote The Bumblebee Flies Away, about Barney Snow, a teenager who is a voluntary patient in an experimental psychiatric clinic. Again Cormier manages to shock and disturb us. Most people look back on their teenage years as the happiest of their lives, the years they would most like to relive. Cormier exposes this as the ultimate fiction: teenagers have perhaps the hardest lives of all. Very few teachers seem willing to say this, but perhaps they’re subtly implying it by assigning Cormier’s books to their students.


Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. Angel on September 4, 2007 9:44 am

    Sounds horrible…glad these were after my time.

  2. Christopher Waldrop on September 4, 2007 10:58 am

    Hey, when it comes to teenage literature you’d be surprised how entertaining and enlightening horrible can be.

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Speak your mind

<< Post Navigation >>

« « Jellyfishing! | We Must Love One Another Or Die. » »