ABSTRACT
Robert Cormier produced a world where beleaguered citizens accepted “peace at any price” in order to survive the forces arrayed against them. Although Cormier may have become an accidental young adult author because of how The Chocolate War was marketed, he has left an indelible impression on the genre and has been recognized for his accomplishments. The Chocolate War captures a fundamental ideological shift from the 1960s, when citizens challenged the establishment, to the 1970s, when everyone “realized that there were limits to what they could change about the world”. F. Jameson’s second interpretive horizon, a social reading of the text, examines ideologemes or ideological “utterances” from an “essentially collective or class discourse”; this horizon combines the second Marxist claim that history is the record of class conflict with the third claim that human consciousness is comprised of ideologies.
