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Summary
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
A pregnant woman has a dream about an owl that leaves her rattled. She doesn’t know it, but something has “intruded” into her baby, without physically disturbing her or the baby. Five years later, she takes her child to the zoo and sees an owl that reminds her of the dream.
The prologue is deliberately mysterious, creating a sense of foreboding without offering any specific answers. The sense of intrusion that the woman in the story feels causes her to distrust the world around her, even her own child, which sets up how the rest of the novel will also explore feelings of distrust.
Themes
