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Chapter 37
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The 5th Wave, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trust and Belief
Survival and Perseverance
Warfare and Dehumanization
Family
Summary
Analysis
It’s night, and the bus with Sammy on it keeps driving. Sammy offers some of his water to a very thin, dark-haired girl sitting near him. She says her name is Megan. Megan starts to cry when she hears that Sammy’s father and sister are still alive. When a medic comes by, Sammy tells them that Megan is sick, although she denies it. Parker takes Megan’s temperature and says that she has a fever, but Sammy doesn’t. Megan doesn’t want to go to the hospital, believing that’s where people go to die.
Megan shows how, as difficult as Sammy’s own situation is, some of the other kids are even worse off. Megan has done nothing to deserve losing her family or to end up so sickly, and so she draws attention to the unfairness of life. Megan’s belief that a hospital is where people go to die reflects her childish way of looking at the world (since although people do die at hospitals, that’s not the goal), but she also presciently suggests the possibility of something sinister going on at Camp Haven.
Themes
