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Chapter 6
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Discovering Wes Moore, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Choice vs. Chance
Mentorship and Support
Community, Identity, and Belonging
Coming of Age
Summary
Analysis
Wes, now age 18, is onboard an Army aircraft above Alabama with other paratrooper candidates, nervously waiting to be called for his first ever parachute jump.
The narrative jumps ahead to reveal that Wes has stuck with the military academy and is preparing to risk his life for his training.
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Wes looks back on the last year that had led him to this point: he had excelled on the Valley Forge basketball team, getting lots of attention and attractive recruitment offers. Wes confidently imagines that he’ll be in the NBA one day. While playing basketball one day with his uncle Howard, however, Howard gets realistic with Wes about the statistically tiny chance that he’d ever make it to the NBA. He encourages Wes to make a backup plan. As Wes plays in increasingly competitive tournaments, he comes to realize that Howard was right: his talent is not quite NBA level, and he must begin making other plans.
With another jump of a few years, Wes is now a budding adult with fully formed interests and passions and an impressive roster of accomplishments for someone just 18 years of age. His uncle Howard reemerges here as a powerful mentor figure, and his realistic advice about pursuing basketball has a major impact on Wes’s future.
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A book about basketball introduces Wes to the joys of reading, and he quickly devours writers like Walt Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin, whose humor and creativity in the face of hardship inspires him. He’s also empowered by Malcolm X’s autobiography. The autobiography that really stands out for him is Colin Powell’s: Powell was a Black man who rose through the ranks in the Army and found a way to love and serve his country despite its racism. Wes begins to appreciate that everyone who has most impacted him has been in the armed forces, including his history teacher, who taught him the importance of working hard to make one’s brief time on Earth worthwhile. Reflecting on this, Wes decides to stay at Valley Forge for junior college and become a leader of soldiers.
On the plane, Wes and his fellow paratroopers-in-training are shaking with fear. Wes reflects that just one week earlier, he had been made regimental commander of a group of 700 soldiers, a responsibility he’s not sure he’s prepared for.
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With one minute to go until the jump, Wes nervously repeats his parachute training in his head. Any small misstep could lead to catastrophe. The jumpmaster yells for the men to jump, and one by one they file off the plane. Wes prays, jumps out, and is flooded with peace and gratitude when he looks up to see that his parachute has opened.
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