Summary Of Todd Strasser's The Wave

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The Wave is a short novel about the effects of conformity and social coercion. It describes an experiment done by a history class teacher, Ben Ross, to answer questions raised by his students after watching a documentary on World War II. The experiment is eerily close to the event it was based on, the persecution of Jews in World War II. Consequently, the experiment was ended. The author, Todd Strasser, suggests that conformity to a group causes ignorance of the effect of an action. Human behaviour is depicted throughout the book through loyalty, social coercion, and loss of identity and proper awareness through conformity. Firstly, conformity causes ignorance. As The Wave gains movement, the students who aren’t participants are at first lightly …show more content…

In The Wave, the individual members in The Wave may have had their own thoughts, but did not express them because of fear, which caused loss of identity and individualism. For example, a student had been fearful of the effects of The Wave and wrote an anonymous letter to The Grapevine because he did not want to face the wrath of the members of The Wave. Creativity and individual thoughts is what sets us apart, and The Wave took that away from them. In reality, many members had “hidden” negative thoughts about The Wave, and left after they found a good opportunity as many people were leaving. Mr. Ross had also said that the members had stopped thinking for themselves, pursuing the common good for the group. The other students stopped thinking of each other as individuals with their own thoughts, instead just grouping everyone together as members of The Wave. This also happened with the non-Wave members, who grouped all the members of The Wave as a group. This idea is similar to the one portrayed in On the Sidewalk Bleeding, which talks about a boy who is bleeding to death on the sidewalk, Andy. In his final moments, Andy thinks about his identity and why he was stabbed. He realized that the attackers only stabbed him because he was a Royal, not because he was Andy. He wanted only to be known as Andy, and not a Royal. Joining this

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