Describing setting and predicting future events- The Maze Runner

This weekend, I picked up the book The Maze Runner by James Dashner, and made a good dent in it (hey, 3 chapters is an accomplishment for someone like me).  I have heard from many people that it is a very good book, and with the movie recently leaving the theatres, it seemed fitting that I see what all the fuss is about. I managed to finish the first three chapters this weekend and I will say that I understood why this book is so highly rated right from the first page. For anyone who hasn't read the book (although you really should) I was very fascinated with the setting. As the title of the book suggests, (ever so subtlety) there is a maze that is cause for a large amount of foreshadowing and adds to the mysterious tone of the exposition. When the protagonist, Thomas, emerges from the dark metal "elevator" that he awakes in at the beginning of the book, the reader gets a very specific description of the setting that is rich with imagery. I especially liked when the author said, “They stood in a vast courtyard several times the size of a football field, surrounded by four enormous walls made of gray stone and covered in spots with thick ivy. The walls had to be hundreds of feet high and formed a perfect square around them, each side split in the exact middle by an opening as tall as the walls that, from what Thomas could see, led to passages and long corridors beyond."(Dashner 9)

     After reading the first three chapters, I have a few predictions to make. There was a lot of foreshadowing in the first 3 chapters, as should be expected from the exposition of any good novel, but there were a few specific things that caught my attention. For starters, when the glade is introduced to the reader for the first time, the author describes that each wall is "split in the exact middle by an opening" and visible through these openings are, "passages and long corridors". The title of the book helps me infer that this is a maze. From previous dystopian novels I have read, I know that the protagonist often has some quality or eventual actions that set them apart from the group they are put in. From this and again, the title, I would not be surprised if Thomas ends up being a leader in the group of "Gladers" he has been introduced into. I will also further predict that from the events in chapter 3 (read the book for specifics) that there is some danger lurking in the maze that the Gladers will eventually be running from. I am very excited to see how my predictions compare to the actual novel as I continue to read.

This picture shows what the Glade is shown like in the movie. I have not seen the movie yet but I was surprised to find that this is very close to the way I imagined it.