At times in life, you are stuck between a crossroad, and which ever option you choose, you will lose. Yet you can’t just stand there like an idiot, rather just choose an option and learn to live with the consequences. The characters in the books The Maze Runner by James Dashner, and My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult both faced a crossroad of such. Although Dashner and Picoult both addresses the concept of moral in their books, they take different approaches in doing so. While Picoult addresses the concept more directly in My Sister’s Keeper, Dashner hides it deeper in the text. Numerous things in this society are taken for granted, breaking a law is bad, being kind to others is good. But the decisions the characters in the two books faced were much more complicated by that. The right and wrong, is not so easily defined, and an argument between if it makes them a good or bad person follows.

In The Maze Runner, the creators of the Maze faced a decision between sacrificing over hundred children’s lives for a cure that might not work, or sit and wait for the three billion people left in the futuristic post-apocalyptic world to slowly catch the disease and die. By choosing the first, they would face countless oppositions, as the research would require substantial amounts of extensive resources to complete, and the experiments exhibit a high risk of failure. Moreover, the cure could take long periods of time to invent, and have a high chance of availability only to small groups of people. While choosing the latter would face accusation of having the potential to save the human race, but instead gave up without trying, and just waiting for everyone to die. The creators had chosen the first option, and various opinions concerning the experiment and research arose. Some believed that sacrificing the minority for the majority is the right choice, even with the high risk of failure. Some don’t see it that way, they believe the creators were just a bunch of fakes, the experiments were make believe, the cures would never be invented; instead they were hogging the resources and trying to save themselves. Another opinion was that the minority still mattered, and forcing over a hundred children to sacrifice their lives for the majority was intolerable and unethical. While the book didn’t pose a definite opinion on whether they were doing good or bad, sometimes they can be both and neither at the same time.

Similarly, in My Sister’s Keeper, Anna and her mother both stood at the crossroad of life changing decisions, and made choices that would have shocked others oblivious to the full situation, while could also be argued to be deemed necessary at the time. Sara had used one daughter as a resource for the other to save the life of the latter. While Anna files a law suit against her mom that would tear her family apart and mean certain death for her sister. These choices may seem selfish, but that doesn’t mean they are wrong, Sara and Anna were simply doing what was necessary to keep themselves intact. Anna is a designer baby, chosen with a specific bone marrow type, and was born because Kate was diagnosed with APL and needed a bone marrow match donor. Growing up, Anna had donated blood, bone marrow, granulocytes, lymphocytes, anything Kate needed to fool her body into thinking it’s healthy and prolong her life span a little, every time Kate got sick. Anna was also Kate’s best friend, Anna gave her sister all the better things, obeyed her wishes, and has always been there for Kate when she needed Anna. To outsiders Anna was a role model for a good sister, but her decision of filing a petition for medical emancipation, and refusal of donating a kidney begs to differ. Anna’s entire life had revolved around her sister, and has also been defined in terms of her sister. She has reached a age when she started to question who she really is, and has discovered that by saving her sister, she was losing herself. It can be argued that Anna’s decision is selfish, yet that doesn’t make her a bad person, but simply human.

Then looking at Sara, Anna’s mother, she had used Anna as a resource of body parts for Kate, her first daughter, who was diagnosed with APL when she was four. Kate would die if she didn’t have a bone marrow match donor, and in this perilous situation, Sara chose to sacrifice Anna, her second daughter for the first. Like many other similar situations, the idea using one’s life in an attempt to save another’s faced strong opposition. Sara’s decision of choosing a baby from embryonic state also faced an abundance of criticism. But to Sara her world collapsed twelve years ago when her four-year-old daughter was diagnosed with APL, and everything except for saving Kate ceased to matter. A mother’s love and need to protect their children is stronger than anything els, and in this case, even stronger than the urge to protect another child of her own, because she was so completely incased in saving the first one.

Although Picoult and Dashner both discussed the concept of morality in their books, and what it means to be a good person, they took a different approach to achieve that. In My Sister’s Keeper, the concept is printed across every page. The events of the story, and the dialogue, thinking actions of the characters clearly communicate each of their views, and stance in the morality of actions. While in The Maze Runner, the topic is hidden deeper into the story, and close examination is required to find it. In fact, the main plot of the story barely grazes the idea, while the issue of morality is more in the background of the story, when the creators were introduced toward the end of the story. Picoult using a more direct approach focused on the concept more, and through multiple examples in the story, while Dashner’s opinion was less obvious and only appeared of importance in one event.

In life, there are always decisions that seem neither right or wrong, while being a bit of both. We are at crossroads all the time, but for the majority of the time, they are not life-changing decisions, like choosing between milk and orange juice for breakfast; while others are much harder, similar to the situations of the characters in the books The Maze Runner, and My Sister’s keeper. Decisions that experienced consequences equally as harsh on both ends, while little or no good comes out of it. At some point in our lives, we will surely all encounter decisions like this. Question ourselves whether it’s good or band, and right or wrong, thinking about it more deeply than ever before, and come to the conclusion of neither. Some things simply are without being defined by the inadequate, very human aspects of judging.