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Chapter 38
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
The bus pulls up to Camp Haven. Sammy feels uncertain but tries to imagine that he’s safe. A man named Major Bob addresses all the newly arriving boys and girls in a hanger-like building. He splits them up into reds and greens. Sammy is a red because his temperature was normal. As Megan gets separated from Sammy, she screams for him not to leave her. A medic reassures him that she’s going to be okay.
The separation of children into two different distinct groups suggests a black-and-white way of looking at the world. As Sammy, Cassie, and Zombie have all learned, things are rarely that simple in the real world, raising questions of how and why Camp Haven categorizes the children in that way.
Themes
Sammy goes to a new part of Camp Haven, where a voice on a loudspeaker greets the children, telling them to wait for someone to call their number. A nurse washes him and disinfects him for lice and ticks. Sammy asks about Cassie and his dad, and the nurse says they’ll come eventually but Sammy is first priority. Eventually, a doctor comes in and implants a microchip in Sammy. When the procedure is over, Sammy has been tagged as number 49.
The way that Sammy is tagged with a number reflects how, at least in the eyes of the people who run the camp, he has lost his individuality and is now just a statistic. That, combined with the delousing procedure, make the camp seem less like a place to protect children and more like a prison.
Themes
