An Analysis Of Rational Individualism In The Chocolate War From A Perspective Of Ethics

Robert Cormier is one of today’s most controversial American writers of young adult literature. His works, which employ New Realism to demonstrate a more cruel and real society to American youth, have broken many limits of contraindication in previous congeneric literary fictions. The Chocolate War, one of his masterpieces, has ranked the third on the list of the “Top 100 Banned/ Challenged Books in 2000–2009” drafted by American Library Association for its frank language, violence and sexual content, and bleak ending. In the academic area abroad, Cormier’s works have attracted extensive study of Western critics while domestic scholars have not paid much attention to this writer until recent years. A plenty of those literary critics focus their researches on the author Cormier, his writing features or the commonplace of the coming-of-age theme, but in their critical works, very little attention has been paid to the ethics reflected from the book. Therefore, this thesis attempts to analyze the rational individualism reflected in the behaviors of the main characters in The Chocolate War from a perspective of ethics, present the ethical relations of reason and selfishness in those behaviors, and point out that individualism emphasizes not only the moral worth of the selfish but also that of the rational, namely, rational individualism.The thesis, in Chapter One, begins with an illustration of background and significance of the study. Then it introduces Robert Cormier and his The Chocolate War briefly, and presents a review of previous studies of the novel. Chapter Two makes a particular presentation of the theories of ethics, especially the individualism in ethics and Ayn Rand’s ethical ideas of “rational selfishness”, including some terms of Rand’s theory. Chapters Three, Four and Five constitute the main body of the thesis which focuses on the analysis of individual ethical ideas reflected from the main characters by showing how these individuals make ethical choices to protect their self-interest when they are trapped in ethical dilemmas and how vital rational selfishness is in victory or defeat of this chocolate war. Chapter Six draws a conclusion that a real individualist is not a man who does anything he wants without taking others’ interests into consideration, but a man with rational selfishness. Selfishness without reason will lead to serious self-destruction and even bring about harms to the whole society. Therefore, as a member of the human society, everyone should pursue his self-interest rationally so that we can remain the integrity of individual’s ethical quality, and then achieve the ultimate goal of the human society development.