Conflicts In The 5th Wave

The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey contains a multitude of conflicts. Some of those are minor conflicts and some are major. One major conflict is the obvious humans versus aliens hostility that drives Cassie forward and reminds her of why survival is important; a minor conflict would be Cassie coping with the reality that she murdered somebody for no reason other than her paranoia, and a final minor conflict would be the antagonism between Ben and Reznik. Firstly, the most conspicuous conflict throughout the book, and consequentially the entire trilogy, is the humans and aliens’ feud. The aliens want the humans dead to colonize their planet and the humans want the aliens dead, or at to least leave Earth and torment some other extrasolar planet so
“I wonder what that Cassie would think of me. The Cassie who kills” (Yancey 5). When Cassie saw a wounded man in a looted convenience store, she went to the conclusion that he was a Silencer and shot him, only to reveal that his hand did not contain a gun, but a crucifix necklace. Throughout the book she tries to rationalize the kill by saying that he was dangerous or that she would not have been able to heal him and she put him out of his misery. It is not until she talks with people later on in the story when they tell her she did what she thought was right and that he might have been a Silencer after all that she could finally cope with the death of the Crucifix Soldier. This conflict is important to the plot because it made Cassie accept that she was no longer the Cassie from before the arrival who had to get straight A’s in every class and had a crush on Ben Parish, but she was a survivor. It also made her realize that split second ☺ (Alliteration) decisions made her capricious. The most important impact this had on the plot, however, was when she was faced with the split second decision of killing another innocent man and saving her brother or giving up on her brother and be taken into