The Wave: Full Book Analysis

Todd Strasser’s The Wave follows the rapid rise of a dangerous, cult-like movement that swells through a fictional yet typical American high school. The novel provides powerful lessons about the perils of fascism and the cost of forfeiting individual freedoms while also serving as an essential reminder of humanity’s collective responsibility to not let history’s crimes repeat.

The novel's inciting incident that sets the plot in motion occurs in Chapter 2 when Gordon High’s young, charismatic history teacher, Mr. Ross, shows his class a film about the Holocaust. Students are shocked to see horrific scenes of concentration camps but they are also confused. Students can’t understand how the Holocaust was allowed to happen, how so many German citizens were complicit in the Nazis’ crimes, and how so many citizens later pretended they didn’t know such crimes occurred. Mr. Ross struggles to provide any real answers to their questions, which sets up the novel’s major conflict. As a dedicated educator with a deep concern for humanity, Mr. Ross understands how critical it is that his students find answers to their questions so they can fully absorb the lessons of the Holocaust and help prevent its crimes from recurring. Mr. Ross then conceives a classroom “experiment” to simulate life in Nazi Germany so students can learn the answers to their questions.

What begins as a seemingly innocent classroom exercise quickly morphs into a full-fledged movement that Mr. Ross calls The Wave, one with an exclusive salute, motto, and membership cards. Soon, The Wave flows through all of Gordon High and its members grow increasingly fascistic. They fill the school with propaganda, blindly obey Mr. Ross’s dictatorial orders, willingly concede to being spied on by monitors, threaten non-members, and cause harm to others. Before long, a Jewish sophomore is beaten up and called an anti-Semitic slur. Still, a small but strong minority of students sees through The Wave’s false promises of power, equality, and community. Laurie Saunders, the second main protagonist of The Wave, raises red flags about members’ refusal to think for themselves and blind obedience to Mr. Ross. As editor-in-chief of the school’s newspaper, The Grapevine, Laurie teams up with Carl Block and Alex Cooper to publish an exposé about The Wave that halts the movement’s momentum. Soon after, in Chapter 17, during the novel’s powerful climax, Mr. Ross reveals that students have all been part of his experiment. At a school-wide assembly, he displays a giant image of Adolf Hitler and, to students’ horror, says they’ve behaved like Nazis.

Although Mr. Ross’s words are harsh, he knows they’re needed for students to fully receive the lessons he set out to teach. Also, while his Nazi comparison may sound extreme, The Wave’s rapid rise through Gordon High mirrors the rise of fascism in post-World War I Germany. Mr. Ross’s experiment reveals how quickly fascism can take root and destroy democracies if citizens aren’t cautious. Students learn firsthand how fear and dangerous group conformity, the novel’s antagonist, can negatively influence human behavior. They also see the consequences of bullying and how false promises of power can be especially intoxicating to the powerless. Robert Billings, in particular, transforms from being a frequent victim of bullying to one of The Wave’s most zealous defenders, calling Laurie a “threat” whose voice must be silenced after The Grapevine’s exposé circulates through the school. Laurie’s bravery and determination to speak up against The Wave, however, shows how essential healthy dissent is, and her ability to publish the exposé reveals how critical the freedoms of speech and the press are to thwarting fascism and would-be dictators.

However painful, Mr. Ross’s experiment ultimately resolves the novel's major conflict as students find real-life answers to their original questions about how the Holocaust could have occurred, and how so many people could have complied with the Nazis’ will. Shockingly, as Mr. Ross points out in the novel's conclusion, “Fascism isn’t something those other people did, it is right here, in all of us.” Most importantly, however, students such as David Collins learn how naive they were to believe the Holocaust was merely a part of history that couldn’t happen again. Given the right conditions, students learn, fascism can easily rise again, even in what seems like the most unlikely of places. It’s no coincidence that the specific location of Gordon High and the year this story occurs are noticeably absent. Such a lack of detail suggests that the novel’s events could transpire anytime and anywhere.

Readers, then, shouldn’t let the assortment of outdated scenes and artifacts in The Wave (such as Alex Cooper’s Sony radio) trick them into thinking this story is solely about the past, or simply a work of fiction. The novel, which is based on a real-life incident that occurred in teacher Ron Jones’s history class at a California high school in 1967, along with its larger lessons, are both timeless. Sadly, the genocide that occurred in Nazi Germany was not the world’s first, nor its last. What’s more, Adolf Hitler was not the world’s last autocrat, and fascism didn’t die at the end of World War II. Amid recent rises of autocracies, antisemitism, xenophobia, and homophobia, along with limitations on human rights in various places in the world, The Wave provides a timely reminder of the imperative of staying informed, speaking up, standing up for others, and, however painful, remembering history’s crimes so they can’t be repeated. As Mr. Ross tells all of Gordon High in his concluding speech to end The Wave: “I hope this is a lesson we’ll all share for the rest of our lives. If we’re smart, we won’t dare forget it.”

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