"Insanity:
doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
- Albert Einstein
The story of The Maze Runner by James Dashner is the story
of mice and men. When Thomas first wakes up he has no idea who he is or where
he is. He is told the known story of the Glade and the Maze that surrounds it.
He is told the rules that those who live in the Glade live by. What he felt on
first arriving was the same for each of them. They have been there for nearly
two years, each doing his part to keep order. Those who do not keep order tend
to be the ones who are sentenced to death by the others or die in other ways.
But everything changes when the day after Thomas comes to the Glade, a young
woman arrives. There are only boys in the Glade community…
The Glader’s have a group of people that run through the
Maze looking for an exit. When they return to the Glade before nightfall they create
maps of what they have seen. These maps have been drawn daily for two years.
The walls of the Maze change. And something lurks in the Maze that causes the
boys to go through a process called The Changing. They remember some of their
lives from before the Glade. Those who remember have it out for Thomas and the
girl.
As I read this book, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was
going to be a story where it turned out that the characters were actually mice
in some lab being observed by scientists. It was sad how close that came to
being the actual story. The book started out bland, but about 100 pages in is
when action started to happen. And this was a good thing that it took so long
for the book to start. Within the first ten pages, the author had established a
new language for the characters and it took me until about 60 pages to feel
comfortable reading it. The strange names for the characters made sense when it
was revealed that the names were actually nicknames for famous scientists. Here
is a list of the names and what I believe are the scientists they were named
after:
- Alby = Albert Einstein
- Ben = Benjamin Franklin
- Chuck = Charles Darwin
- Clint= Clinton Davisson
- Frypan = Frederic Chopin
- Gally = Galileo
- Jack = Jack Kilby
- Jackson = Andrew Jackson
- Jeff = Jefferson Davis
- Minho = George Minot
- Newt = Isaac Newton
- Nick = Nicolaus Copernicus
- Stan = Stanley Cohen
- Stephen = Stephen Hawking
- Teresa = Mother Teresa
- Thomas = Thomas Edison
- Tim = Tim Hunt
- Winston = Winston Churchill
- Zart = Mozart
I got this list by first going over what the book identified
as the real names of some of the characters, then looking up Nobel Prize winners,
and then for the other names typed into Google part of the name and the first
name that resulted from it was the one I would assume would fit. These may not
really be who the characters are named after, but to me it feels like a good
fit.
How about that quote at the top? In the book, the
characters are doing the same thing every day… yet still expect to find
something different. Though I wouldn’t say that these children are insane, they
could become insane.
Yep. You can say that is what they do, but it is what
they have been expected to do. For the next book, are they going to keep up
with insanity or are they going to repeat the above picture?
Congrats, you made it this far! As the newcomer to you amazing group of people, here is a small fact about myself.
- I live in Sun Prairie, but used to live outside of Chicago. I live with my parents and own a fawn-pied dove named Thalassa and a quaker parrot named Leto. Thalassa was rescued from a hoader and she has become a lovely member of the flock. Leto is named after a character from one of my favorite book series. Can you guess which one?
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