The Wave

Nedanstående innehåll är skapat av Mimers Brunns besökare. Kommentera arbete

Author: Morton Rhue

Main Characters: The characters that this story is mostly about are Laurie, David and Ben Ross. Laurie is a young ambitious student in Gordon High, David is her boyfriend and a football player in Gordon Highs football team. Laurie is what you may call a hero in this book. Ben Ross is their teacher in history class. Both of them thinks that he is a very good teacher.

Type of book, Time and Setting: This book is a true story which took place in Palo Alto, California in 1969. But the names and places have been changed in this book. The time has no difference except the technique they are using, it could be any time when the television etc. had been invented. The location of the story has no meaning at all, this could happen anywhere in the world.
It’s quite hard to put this book in a special genre, but I would probably categorised it as a thriller.

Story:
The class watches a film about world war two, Hitler and the death camps. After the film some of the pupils have some questions that Ben finds impossible to answer, how the Nazis could do the things they did, how the rest of Germany could be so passive, why anybody could join the Nazis. Ben comes up with an idea that he thinks is very good. A little experiment that will show the class how the Germans easily could join the Nazis. He uses the students as guinea pigs. He started the next with the experiment next lesson, first he taught them to be disciplined, then he taught them about community and action. Then he taught them a salute that they always should make when they met him or a member of the class. He painted a symbol of a wave and called the whole thing “The Wave”.

The whole class stood up did the salute and nearly screamed the motto “Strength through discipline, Strength through community, strength through action”. Ben thought that it was amazing to see, he had thought that the pupils wouldn’t like to be disciplined and that he made decisions for them, but they worked much harder and liked it a lot. Even students from other classes went to his class just to be in “The Wave”. Ben did member cards gave it to the students, some had a X on it and they which got one of these was supposed to report if anyone of the members did something wrong. The experiment was a big success Ben thought.

But it was getting out of control… big time. Some of the members threatened the students who didn’t want to join, they even beat up on kid. And now Ben had to stop it, but he wasn’t sure of how, he wasn’t even sure he wanted to stop it…

Language and Consutruction: The language that Morton Rhue has used in this book is quite easy, besides from a few slang words, there is almost no words that you don’t understand.
The narrator of the book is a person who isn’t in the book, it’s told in third person. The book is chronological and does not have any flashbacks.

Subject: The Wave isn’t just about one thing, it is about many things, like friendship, leadership, how to treat others and of course it’s about a school and what happens there.

Message: The meaning of this book is to show kids(and adults, but considering the language that was used in this book I think it’s most for teenagers) how easy it is to want to be in a group where everyone is said to be an equal to the other, even if the purpose of the group isn´t good, if they have evil attentions. Just as what happened in Germany before and during the second world war.

Opinion: I think that this is a very goo...