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Chapter 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Wave, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Groupthink and Coercion
History and the Past
Equality vs. Independence
Education
Summary
Analysis
That afternoon, Ben Ross is perturbed as he leaves school. He’s anxious about the fact that he wasn’t able to provide his students with good enough answers to their questions about how the majority of Germans behaved during World War II. On the way out of school, Ross stops at the library to take out several books on the Holocaust, and looks forward to several uninterrupted hours of reading back at home while his wife Christy plays tennis.
This passage again demonstrates how devoted Ross is to really working on behalf of his students and helping them to find the answers they seek. His duties to them don’t stop at the end of class.
Themes
After several hours of reading, Ross is still unable to find the answer to the questions he’s looking for. He wonders if the answer is something historians can’t explain—if the answer lies in “re-creating a similar situation.” He considers conducting an in-class experiment that gives the students “a taste of what life in Nazi Germany might have been like.”
That night, when Christy arrives home, she is excited to tell her husband all about her tennis game, but Ben is deep in his books, and greets Christy absently and distantly. Christy isn’t upset—she knows how “utterly absorbed” he can get in things he’s teaching or studying. She tells him to finish his work and not worry about her—but not to come to bed too late and sacrifice his sleep.
Ben’s wife Christy admires his work ethic, even if she knows that he can get a little obsessive sometimes about his many different interests.
Themes
