Gone beyond Gone…
My latest book obsession is Maze Runner by James Dashner and the way he has built the character of Newt who is just a teenager with quality of good leader but at the same time being everyone’s friend. This character has just brought a different perspective and made me think of him as my spirit animal that just guide me and help me with my normal daily life.
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| Newt played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster in the Maze Runner movie |
The character has nothing great or super power. He was second in command boy with a lot of calmness, knowledge and understanding. He managed people nicely and never shown anger or command to get his work done. In the book, the character is infected with a disease called Flare, which eats your brain and make you go crazy. This crazy is not mental crazy. This crazy is when a person doesn’t know what he is doing, he becomes animal who can do anything, also eat human if he is hungry. Flare starts catching up to Newt and slowly he becomes a different person who struggles a lot to hold on to his sanity. He puts an effort to be calm and react rather than just get angry and start killing.
The self-restraint and struggle shown to just tell his friend to leave him because he will get worse and he doesn’t want any of them to see that stage of him. I have really admired the ability of this guy to actually put himself in danger so that the person he care about can be saved and doesn’t get affected due to his illness.
His struggle to be calm and try not to kill people is painful. How in our normal everyday life, we failed to do it and when we are in trouble, rather than finding out a way, we just sob and cry and blame the world. Here, Newt will have dark days where he will do things which he never imagined a human doing and his brain will not be able to control but still his conscious will be well aware of how crazy he is acting. Instead of crying and sobbing, he goes and makes living somewhere else so that he doesn’t hurt the people close to him. But he is also scared of him doing something which he will regret and that’s why tell his friend to Kill him when the time is right. He agreed to give up his life when his brain doesn’t have control of what is right or what is human.
Was it a right decision or was he scared to live and want an easy route of death?
I always believe that killing yourself is the worst thing you can do with your life, but does it make sense to live a life where you will be worse than an animal and go Crazy beyond crazy? Would not death be an end to living a horrible life? Wouldn’t death will be better than killing others without your consciousness alive? Wouldn’t death will be a way to remember good of a person and just not be the person who can’t believe yourself to be.
In this book, I respected Newt’s decision to end his life than to be someone you do not have control over. What is the point of living a life where nothing left of you because your brain stops recognizing you and your consciousness?
Life needs to be respected. I have seen life getting snatch from people who didn’t deserve to die and saw people who do bad lived a long healthy life. The odds of who living and who’s dying is in the hands of no one. And being at a stage when you know nothing can stop the inevitable, you just accept the fact and hope for less suffering. Newt decided that his life was going to end, one way or another. Well, in the book he got the chance to finish his life before the stage of gone beyond recover came. But in real life, people who know that their day is nearer, don’t have the option to just finish it off. They end up suffering every single day, painful death is what they get in the end. Be at a stage where their body and mind doesn’t support them. The people he/she cares about are with them watching each and every day. The feeling of helplessness keeps crawling every moment. Sight is torturing but the biggest torture is watching with the fact that nothing you can do will or is going to fix the problem. At that moment, the value of life means nothing to you. In the end it comes down to ending it sooner than designated time without further more suffering.
Suffering will be there at every moment, only the moment when it is beyond repair that is the moment, holding on to life is just a spark of hope, hoping beyond reason to be alive for a one more day without reaching a stage of gone beyond gone.
