The Wave

The history teacher responsible for the experiment The Wave, Ben Ross is idealistic, obsessive, and, during his experiment, prone to naivete. The early descriptions of Ben paint him as creative, approachable, and unusually capable of engaging his students. His colleagues are “[d]ivided in their feelings towards him” (5) and consider him “[y]oung, naive, and overzealous” (5), with a penchant for spectacle and unconventional teaching methods. His wife, Christy, tolerates his obsessions because she admires his passion and because his interests are relatively harmless. However, she admits to herself, “It was almost frightening, the way he lost himself in each new adventure” (27). This is quirky when it’s bridge or history, but less so when Ben is attempting to replicate Nazi Germany in school.

His students describe his enthusiasm as “contagious,” meaning “that he was charismatic. He could get through to them” (5). This makes Ben a potentially dangerous character. If he can get through to students, which not all teachers can, he has the responsibility to treat his contagious enthusiasm and focus with care. Ben has a charisma often associated with teachers who interact easily with students and whom students often consider cool. Likewise, uncanny charisma is often associated with dictators, making them capable of easily drawing people to follow their cause. At its best, charisma is disarming, useful, and magnetic, as Ben illustrates in the novel’s opening section. At its worst, charisma can transform a leader with good intentions into a ruthless figure who finds power too seductive to relinquish.

Unlike Hitler, Ben doesn’t set out to gain power or to crush his enemies, and he eventually regains the self-awareness to see that even he’s not immune to the flattery and obedience that power grants him. Rather than persist with The Wave or risk his reputation and career, he chooses to use himself as an example of how easily corruption can begin. When he tells the students that they would have made good Nazis, he doesn’t exempt himself: By implication, as their leader, he might have made a good dictator. For most of the novel, Ben exemplifies the well-meaning leadership figure who finds himself gradually seduced by power. He never intends to enjoy the experiment but finds himself enjoying the admiration of his followers, whom he used to think of as students.

Ultimately, Ben has the humility to realize that the experiment has gotten away from him. His narrative arc takes him from a quirky, cool teacher who wants to reach his students through unconventional means, to someone who enjoys the feeling of needing a bodyguard, and back again to his former humility. Luckily, his experiment is a success, and implies that Ben’s experiment will serve him and his students well in the future. Ben learns from his mistakes, helping his students do the same, rather than experiencing the fate of history’s most ruthless dictators: death, exile, or prison.

Laurie’s boyfriend and a member of the football team, David Collins is her foil regarding his attitude toward the experiment. When David is introduced, he reacts to the documentary by flatly stating that the Holocaust could never happen again. For most of the novel, he’s a one-dimensional version of a familiar character, the high school jock. After seeing the documentary, the author describes him as “torn between waiting for his girlfriend and filling his growling stomach. The stomach won” (13). He’s presented as humorous, slightly oblivious, and generally harmless.

However, David’s character serves important functions in the story: He shows how an ideology can split romantic partners who end up on opposite sides of a movement. He’s a reminder that people who loved each other faced impossible questions when they confronted the spread of Nazism, and their feelings and ultimate allegiances didn’t always align. David introduces The Wave to the football team, naively thinking that bravado and declarations of strength will make up for their lack of talent and actual strength. Ultimately, this proves a foolish approach because the team loses badly to a team that greatly overmatches them athletically, and their allegiance to The Wave and its salutes and slogans has no impact on their performance on the field.

In addition, David represents the possibility for redemption: that recovery from indoctrination is possible for someone who sees the error of their zealotry. Not until he physically assaults Laurie does David understand how extreme his behavior has become. He never would have thought himself capable of harming her, but in hindsight, the trajectory was inevitable: “He wondered how on earth he could have done something so stupid. What could have made him want to hurt the girl, the one he really still loved” (114).