44 pages • 1 hour read
Todd StrasserThe Wave
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Laurie Sanders is the editor-in-chief of The Grapevine, the school newspaper at Gordon High School. She has been with the paper for three years and is often frustrated by the lack of enthusiasm from the rest of the paper’s writers. She leaves the paper’s office and sees her best friend, Amy, through the window of another class. She makes faces at Amy through the glass, and Amy laughs. The bell rings before they get in trouble.
Ben Ross, the school’s history teacher, is awkwardly trying to thread the projector in his class. His wife, Christy, is a music teacher at the school, and they’ve both been there for two years. Ben’s students find him intense and charismatic, and his enthusiasm is contagious. Other faculty like him less, particularly because he uses unconventional teaching methods, such as having his students role play (for example, as political parties or juries).
Ben dislikes the students’ dismissiveness about punctuality or homework. David Collins, Laurie’s boyfriend, enters, and fixes the projector as Robert Billings arrives. Robert is a heavyset, quiet boy who is usually alone and is a frequent target for bullies. Ben tells the class that their homework is getting too sloppy, and threatens to lower their grades if it gets messier. It’s the third class in which he has made the threat.
Chapter 2 Summary
Ben shows the class a documentary about the Nazi concentration camps. As usual, when he talks about the Holocaust, he grows furious as he explains the Final Solution—Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews and anyone else deemed unworthy of living in the coming German utopia. Upon viewing the film, most of the students are stunned, and Ben isn’t surprised, given that most of them are sheltered kids from privileged, middle-class families.
Because some students start joking uncomfortably after the film, Ben worries that they’re treating the footage like a mere TV program. He sees that Robert is asleep. Amy and Laurie are fighting back tears. Amy asks why no one tried to stop the Nazis if they were in the minority. They’re skeptical when Ben says that most Germans claim that they didn’t know about the atrocities. After class, Laurie tells Ben that she can’t believe anyone could be that cruel.
Ben asks Robert if he’s sleeping at home. He hates that everyone picks on the boy, but Robert says he doesn’t care about his grades, and it wouldn’t do any good to fail him. Robert’s brother, Jeff, was a popular student and athlete at Gordon High. He’s a pitcher who now plays for the Orioles farm team. As Robert leaves the classroom, Ben tells him that he doesn’t need him to be another Jeff. He just wants him to try harder.
Chapter 3 Summary
Laurie and her boyfriend, David, sit in the cafeteria courtyard. They watch kids move away from Robert when he sits down. David calls Robert an “untouchable” (17), as if he were part of India’s lowest caste. He notes that Robert has always been strange and can’t believe he’s from the same family as Jeff.
Laurie says her mother knows Robert’s mother and that Robert has a typical IQ; he’s just peculiar. When they talk about the documentary, David says, “As something horrible that happened once, it bothers me. But that was a long time ago, Laurie. To me it’s like a piece of history. You can’t change what happened then” (18). He wants to change the subject, and Laurie doesn’t insist on talking more, although she wants to discuss it in more depth.
Amy and Brian, the football team’s quarterback, sit near them. Brian is trying to gain weight before that weekend’s game, but David, the team’s running back, isn’t sure they have a chance. Their team is disorganized. Brian comments on how “weird” Robert is. Then, David asks if anyone knows calculus. He wants a tutor because he’ll need calculus to become a computer engineer.
After the girls leave, Brian and David talk about how much the documentary upset Laurie. Amy and Laurie smoke a cigarette and talk in the Grapevine offices. When Laurie started dating David, Amy wanted to date a football player as well, so she took up with Brian. Laurie dislikes that their friendship always feels competitive.
Carl Block and Alex Cooper, two Grapevine writers, scare them by knocking on the door and pretending to be Principal Owens. Carl is Laurie’s investigative reporter, and Alex is her music reviewer. They’re late in submitting their pieces, and Laurie is exasperated when they quickly leave instead of working.
Chapter 4 Summary
Ben is unsettled by aftermath of the documentary. He thinks his answers to the students’ questions were inadequate. He asks himself, “Was the behavior of Germans during the Nazi regime really so inexplicable?” (25). Then, he wonders if the only way to understand and answer the question is to recreate the situation. Perhaps he could give the students a small glimpse of what Nazi Germany had been like. His wife, Christy, gets home at 11:00 pm to find him surrounded by books on the rise of the Third Reich, the Hitler Youth, and more. She fondly remembers how absorbed he gets in things. He’d played bridge obsessively until he won a tournament. She asks him not to stay up too late but knows he probably won’t sleep.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Nothing is remarkable about Gordon High, which is the point: It could be any nondescript high school, replete with the familiar archetypes of teachers and students that comprise every high school. The novel was published in 1981, which is significant given that the existence of the Internet would have made parts of the story realistic. However, the author doesn’t place the story in a particular time. It could be any school, in any year.
In terms of characterization, Ben’s character is the most important, given that he’ll create The Wave in hopes of teaching an important lesson and answering complex questions about Nazi Germany. The author pays particular attention to Ben’s charisma. Something is magnetic about him, and he’s more capable than most teachers of reaching the students. Ironically, he can’t reach Robert by typical means, which foreshadows the fervor with which Robert will embrace the unorthodox experiment of The Wave. Ben’s charisma and energy are characteristic of many dictators. He’s not an exploiter, but he has the tools to exploit.
The major thematic question driving these initial chapters is one that tormented and eluded even the most erudite historians of the 20th century: how the Holocaust could have happened; how the greatest horror of humanity had been initiated and pursued without majority support; and whether such cruelty resulted from rationality. These questions thematically align with The Momentum of Dangerous Ideas. The early stage of the novel is calm and placid, which contrasts effectively with the tumultuous spread of The Wave. Ben believes that he’s just trying to figure out how to convey a useful lesson. It doesn’t occur to him that he could be laying the foundations for a fascist organization at Gordon High. He tells the students, “All I can tell you […] is that the Nazis were highly organized and feared. The behavior of the rest of the German population is a mystery—why they didn’t try to stop it, how they could say they didn’t know. We just don’t know the answers” (13).
Students like David would rather accept an answer quickly than spend time dwelling on such a complicated, uncomfortable topic. He says, “As something horrible that happened once, it bothers me. But that was a long time ago, Laurie. To me it’s like a piece of history. You can’t change what happened then” (18).
Laurie isn’t interested in changing the past, only in trying to understand what it might mean. Although she becomes the face of the resistance, her role at The Grapevine is rendered more as the loving portrait of an exasperated editor rather than foreshadowing the importance of free speech and a free press. Laurie doesn’t know that she’ll be the loudest dissenting voice against a fascist group; she’s just trying to do her job well. She’s a useful example of the theme of The Importance of Individuality.
The characterization of Robert Billings as a student whom others bully is particularly effective. He’s an outsider, completely disengaged from his peers, in contrast to the past popularity of his older brother, Jeff. In light of the school shootings that have occurred since the novel’s publication in 1981, Robert’s being as a loner might raise suspicions about latent violence. The bullying that he experiences is common, and Robert isn’t a unique figure. However, he doesn’t physically harm anyone, and as Ben contemplates the experiment in Chapter 4, he doesn’t know that Robert will soon find a passion for life and that he’ll stand the most to lose in the end of the experiment. As Chapter 4 ends, Ben is preparing to begin a process that he’ll quickly lose control of, regardless of how well-prepared he thinks he is. He naively thinks he can use the precedent of history to achieve a different outcome, demonstrating a remarkable, if misguided, belief in his own abilities.
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