e out who they want. After some of the members of the gang looked at Jerry’s file Archie said, “He’s just a skinny kid…”(16). Some don’t want to pick on him because he is skinny and others just want to more. The clicks in our school also single out people they don’t know or don’t dress cool. Many respectable people are probably guilty of doing this but when asked to think about it some would feel that people should be judged for who they are not what they look like. Archie also gives members of the gang assignments to perform on students and teachers.In The Chocolate War Archie’s assignments are very cruel and uncalled for. These assignments usually didn’t hurt other students but just harass them. One assignment Archie gave a student was to unscrew the screws on a desk so when a student sat down it would collapse. Archie gave this assignment to Goober, another member, Archie commanded:Everything in Brother Eugene’s room is held together by screws. The chairs, the desks, the blackboards. Now, with your little screwdriver—maybe you’d better bring along various and assorted sizes, just in case—you start to loosen. Don’t take out the screws. Just loosen them until they reach that point where they’re ready to fall out, everything hanging by a thread…(31). The assignments were very cruel and evil and were only done to make the students that weren’t in the Vigils feel left out. These acts of evil by the Vigils continued throughout the novel. The type of actions that occur in novels by Robert Cormier, also occur in the public and private school systems of the great United States. Robert Cormier writes about this gang to show the reader a form of evil that students us on other students in the school. When Laura B. Hoffman interviewed Robert Cormier she asked him “Your books are often considered dark. Why do you choos...
