The Maze Runner

In the novel, all of the characters sent to the Glade lose their memories before being placed in the Box. The shock of this memory loss is palpable for Thomas, as he struggles to remember who he is and why he has been sent to the Glade. In this way, Thomas, and the other Gladers, view memory loss as a loss of their identity. Recovering his memories and his true identity becomes one of Thomas’s main goals in the novel. As Thomas attempts to discover who he is in relation to the Maze, he is faced with monumental questions of identity and self-worth. These questions, and the events in the novel that engender them, lead Thomas to question whether people are indeed the sum of their memories and past experiences or if people can have identities that exist regardless of past and present experiences. Thomas initially thinks that the Glade is a prison, for example, and wonders if he was a violent and immoral person before arriving there. Newt takes issue with this theory at the end of the novel, saying that regardless of Thomas’s identity in the past, he is a different person now, suggesting that people are not the sum total of their memories and experiences.