Ben "Zombie" Parish

Character Analysis

First things first: Ben is not a real zombie. We figured, what with all the aliens running around the pages of The 5th Wave, that we should clear that up. Ben, instead, is a red-blooded, all-American lad. He's a star-football-player-turned-army-sniper. He couldn't get more wholesome (or hunky)… unless he also revealed himself to be Captain America.

Cassie Marie Sullivan agrees. She's crushed on Benjamin Thomas Parish since the third grade. She thinks he's dreamy: she loves him and wants to have, like, ten thousand of his babies.

Or at least that's how she felt before the alien invasion. Now she assumes he's dead, like almost everyone else.

We happen to know that he survived, though—not because we're psychic, but because Ben is one of our trusty narrators. He's a secondary protagonist, which means he's important… just not quite as important as Cassie. After all, no aliens have fallen head-over-heels in love with him.

All-American Boy

To understand who Ben is now that the world has ended, it helps to know who he was before: a seventeen-year-old football player who's popular and perfect. And he knew it. Check out what he has to say about his pre-apocalypse life:

"Six months ago my biggest worries were passing AP Chemistry and finding a summer job that paid enough for me to finish rebuilding the engine on my '69 Corvette. (25.5)

Not bragging too much, but I had to be careful never to smile while I drove: it had the capacity to blind oncoming traffic. (50.25)

In other words, Ben was a living cliché: high school royalty with a healthy ego and a penchant for classic cars.

But nothing takes your cockiness down a notch like watching your whole family get murdered by hoodlums. That's exactly what happened to Ben sometime after the First Wave. He's wracked by guilt about it, especially the death of his little sister. He thinks it was his fault, though we can see (via his flashback to that scene) that there's nothing he could have done.

Ben's bad luck follows him on the road, and he comes down with the deadly alien flu that killed billions of other humans. He manages to survive, but he's so bummed about Sissy that he sort of gives up on life.

Zombie

Just before he gives up the ghost, Ben experiences a sort of reincarnation at the hands of Colonel Vosch, who's maybe even more obsessed with him than high-school Cassie was. Vosch tells him:

"Your potential, I kid you not, is off the charts. You are exactly what we need at exactly the time we need it." (30.42)

It's telling that Vosch appeals to Ben's ego, which still seems to be at least somewhat intact. (It would be hard to stamp out an ego that's as oversized—er, healthy—as Ben's.)

Ben decides to call himself Zombie because he's still enough of a bro to think that sounds cool. (And we're bro enough to agree with him.) He trains hard at the military base, leading his squad to the number one spot in a base-wide competition. Zombie's not motivated by a burning desire to save humanity or anything noble like that. He's in it for stone-cold revenge:

This wasn't about survival. It was about payback. (50.11)

Here's the thing: even as a high-school student, Ben was a kind person. And though he's always making melodramatic declarations about how the old Ben Parish is dead, we can see some of that kindness as he interacts with his team. On the battlefield, he never leaves anyone behind, carrying a gravely injured squad member and putting his neck on the line to pull another one out of harm's way.

Big Brother

Another person Zombie can't leave behind is Nugget—the youngest squad member—who's back on the base. Zombie feels a special connection with the five-year-old, who happens to be the same age as his dead sister.

It's in his crazy—and majorly selfless—plan to rescue his young friend that we see that the old Ben Parish isn't really dead after all. He's still a nurturing big brother figure, if not an actual big brother.

We also see flashes of the "old" Ben when he flirts with Ringer, with whom he may or may not be in l-u-v:

I give her back an honest-to-goodness smile, the old Ben Parish smile, the one that got me practically everything I wanted. Well, not practically; I'm being modest. (59.60)

The fact that we don't want to punch in Ben's perfect teeth—the fact that we still like and care about Ben—after a egotistical line like that is a major testament to his better qualities. He's cool enough to go on an ego trip and be an 100% stand-up guy.