Title (6) The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom is a beautifully written novel that portrays the ever-so-ordinary life of Eddie “Maintenance,” a worker at Ruby Pier who is beloved in the hearts of most but dies an untimely death from a falling ride while trying to save a little girl, Amy or Annie. He doesn’t have a family, or any close friends, and yet the people of the pier, the beachgoers, are so used to seeing him there that he becomes a part of their vacation. The book focuses on Eddie’s afterlife and the five people he meets, and how they affected him. They may have seemed insignificant in life, but don’t we all? The theme of this novel is that no one, or nothing, is insignificant- everything happens for a reason. The first …show more content…
It represents the day-to-day heroism Eddie exudes, even though he doesn’t realize it. It also symbolises Eddie’s mediocre life, and how everything he does is just about reaching a status quo- no goals, no achievements. Only the bare minimum. However, every single day, he saves people's’ lives: and without receiving a news story, a newspaper headline, even so much as a thank-you. So, Eddie may think his regularly-scheduled life is boring, or average, he really deserves the treatment of a hero. As Mitch Albom writes on page 193 after Eddie sees thousands of children having the time of their lives at Ruby Pier, “They were there, or would be there, because of the simple, mundane things Eddie had done in his life, the accidents he had prevented, the rides he had kept safe, the unnoticed turns he had affected every day.” Albom explains it well in the fact that throughout Eddie’s entire career, the tiny things he did every day like flicking a switch or oiling a track saved thousands of lives. No act is useless: Eddie is a …show more content…
Specifically, the hands Eddie felt in his own seconds before he died. He does not remember anything else, no pain, no ride, no screams. They symbolize redemption. He only remembers the small but firm grasp of a child’s hands, to which he assumes to be Amy or Annie, the little girl he pushed out of the way before Freddie’s Free Fall collapsed. Towards the end of the novel, we learn the hands belonged to a young Philipanese child named Tala. Tala was also the tiny figure Eddie saw running around in the flames when he and his squadron lit their prisoner camp aflame. He realizes that he killed this little girl, and is completely distraught over it, as one would naturally be. This symbol appears at the moment of his death, after he dies, and throughout every pocket of heaven he visits, because he always asks the same question: did I save her? As it explains on page 192, “But I felt her hands. It is the only thing I remember. I couldn’t have pushed her. I felt her hands.” Tala responds, “Not her hands. My hands. I bring you to heaven. Keep you safe.” These tiny hands symbolize redemption because without Eddie’s death, his ultimate sacrifice, it would have been years before he felt any sort of security over what happened in the war. He was able to redeem himself, to relieve himself of the guilt he has felt for 50 years. Tala forgave him and allowed him to wash away her scars and singed flesh in her home, with
This causes us to resonate with Eddie’s feelings of desperation and anguish that he is being told he is something he is not. Miller makes the audience sympathise with Eddie because he worked hard to help the cousins even though they weren’t his own children. This is shown when he says ‘I put a roof over their heads and
It is Eddie’s fifth birthday, and an Irish man, called Mickey Shea joyfully picks Eddie up by his feet and shakes him out once for each year he has completed, while the other adult men laugh and cheer. Firstly, “Eddie is wearing his birthday gift, a red cowboy hat and a toy holster. He gets up and runs from one group to the next, pulling out the toy gun and going, ‘Bang, bang!’ ‘C’mere boy’ Mickey Shea beckons from a bench. ‘Bang, bang,’ goes Eddie. MIckey Shea works with Eddie’s dad, fixing the rides. He is fat and wears suspenders and is always singing Irish songs. To Eddie, he smells funny, like cough medicine” (Albom 23). This is the beginning part of one of the flashbacks that talks about Eddie’s birthday, where the writer introduce Mickey
The book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom is a book full of reflection, life lessons, and experiences of the joys and sorrows that accompany life. The Five People You Meet in Heaven is about an old man named Eddie who meets his death after an accident at a theme park. On his path to heaven, Eddie meets five people from his life who he had an impact on, or who impacted him. These people teach Eddie important lessons before he is ready to move on. In the portion of the book about Eddie’s 2nd person, his captain, Eddie learns more about his life at war. The movie, The Five People You Meet in Heaven is very similar to the book at this part. In the section about war, in both the book and the movie, Eddie relives his experiences
After Eddie found out all of the interesting things that he never knew about his father, he is now more accepting himself as a person and where he came from, as well as accepting where his father came
Throughout the novel, Eddie also can be exemplified as a sympathetic character. sympathetic characters are when readers feel sympathy for throughout a story. The reader can feel empathy for Eddie, when the author describes the pain of Eddie’s gunshot wound. The pain was described to be unbearable and the description of the event of the gunshot pains a morbid picture in the reader’s mind. During Eddie’s time as a soldier in World War II, any reader can feel an astonishing amount of sympathy for Eddie. During, Eddie’s time as a soldier, he experienced, “A piercing pain ripped through Eddie's leg. He screamed a long, hard curse then crumbled to the ground. Blood was spewing below his knee. Plane engines roared. The skies lit in bluish flashes. He lay there, bleeding and burning, his eyes shut against the searing heat, and for the first time in his life, he felt ready to die,” (Albom 84). The reader can comprehend Eddies suffering and pain. Eddie was on the ground, in a war zone hurt and slowly dying. Readers can feel a lot of sympathy for when Eddie wanted to let go of the world and die. Before Eddie’s death, he ran under a falling amusement park ride to save a little girl, Eddie
The lesson that the Sargent had to teach Eddie was about sacrifice. “Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious you’re not really losing it, you’re just passing it on to someone else.” (94) In other words, the Sargent sacrificed Eddie’s leg to save his life, and he also sacrificed his life in order to preserve the lives of his
The author Mitch Albom incorporates sacrifice which is a big part of being a brothers keeper in The Five People you Meet in Heaven. Eddie was in war for a short period of time, during this time The Captain becomes his keeper because he shot himself in the leg to protect Eddie, as a captain he should have done this. He teaches him that grieving is the only way out of a tough situation, similar to the one he is in. Eddie does not recognize the reasoning behind why he did what he did. The Captain explains to Eddie, "Sacrifice, you made one. I made one. We all make them. But you are angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost… You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life." (Albom 93). By doing this it shows his bravery, loyalty and companionship towards Eddie. He shot Eddie in the leg so Eddie would not die in the burning tent. Even though he sacrificed his life for Eddies he was
When you imaging heaven, what do you think it would be like? In this particular movie an elderly man named Eddie has a very unique experience of going to heaven, where he meets five people. Before he passed away, Eddie worked at an amusement park called Ruby Pier. When he was just a little kid, his dad worked there and he would go to work with him a lot, so he got to know the park very well. He ended up working as the maintenance man until he was 83 years of age. One day one of the rides broke down, and it was falling towards a little girl who Eddie tried to save. As he died, he felt the little girl's hands but he wasn’t sure if he saved her or not. While he is in the afterlife, he meets five different people who each have a lesson to teach him. Of those five people who he meets in heaven, the three most important are, the blue man, the war captain, and Tala.
His second stop is where he meets his commanding officer of his world war II platoon. Eddie remembers being held captive along with his captain and four others. He also was the one responsible for coming up with a plan for them to escape. After they did that the captain told them to burn the place they were held captive but eddie ran back because he thought he saw a young girl, but a bullet was shot and hit him right in the knee. He learned the importance of sacrifice from the captain who then says that that it was him who shot eddie. He says that he had to sacrifice his knee in order to save his life. The captain then reveals that he died because he stepped on a landmine getting Eddie to safety, meaning he also made sacrifice.One his way out he advises Eddie to let go of his anger. The third stop is where he sees a vision of his father. He had flashbacks of the abuse he suffered from the hands of his father when he was drunk.then he meets Ruby who’s husband is the founder of Ruby Pier which was named after her. She offers him a new way to look at his father’s death. Eddie believed that his father died because he made a decision while drunk to jump into the freezing water and caught pneumonia, but really he was trying to save his friend mickey’s life. Mickey tried to kill himself after Eddie’s father caught him assaulting
That one even becomes his own identity. As an teen age boy, Eddie produces more than young boy could do. He used his own cultural understanding to communication with people surround. Instead of oral language, the music become the platform for his “two selves”.
After learning his lesson about forgiveness from Ruby, Eddie implements the teachings he received to work towards forgiving his father. Throughout his childhood, Eddie encounters abuse by his father’s hand, and during his battle with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, after returning from the war, and trying to cope with his leg injury, the only thing that Eddie’s father says to him is, “get up and get a job,” (Albom 108). Many other instances of physical, emotional, and psychological abuse take place throughout Eddie’s life, thus prompting the insightful passage of, “All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair,” (Albom 104). Eddie even goes to describe his relationship with his father as occurring in three stages throughout his lifetime; neglect, violence, and silence. Upon the event of his father’s death, Eddie feels obligated to quit his schooling, work at the Pier full-time, and look after his mother, who is completely lost in her grief in the aftermath of losing her husband. Later on in the novel, Eddie explains that all he wanted to do in life was get away from the Pier, but he uses his circumstance as a reason not to,
The 5 People You Meet in Heaven The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom is known for its great amount of symbolism throughout the book. As Eddie, the main character, was killed while he worked at Ruby Pier, before he could go to heaven and live a happy place, he had to meet five specific people. Symbolism is a greater sense of meaning to what is written, beyond what has been described. Mitch Albom uses symbolism to show how each person Eddie meets in heaven impacted him in some way or another.
Eddie at the beginning of the story was hopeful that his career would succeed.Everything started going well for him, people said he played from the heart. He was starting to show that he had money, he got a leather jacket and and wore a chain. He made 1 record that went to the charts. When he went to hollywood he met a girl immediately and moved in with her. Not only that she taught him how to play the guitar which started his music career.Eddie started to become successful however when the A&R man told him that he doesn't hear a single. His music career was basically over, he had no idea what to do, he was confused. He was lost, he had no career when his A&R man fired him, he is “a rebel without a
Eddie was born into a broken home without a strong father figure in Harlem on one of the worst streets in the town. There were already so many people judging him because of his race and where he was brought up. For a short time, Eddie chose to fulfill a more meaningful future instead of dwelling on his race, but ultimately, he decided to let the stereotypes of his race define him. As time went on at Exeter, Eddie learned firsthand what others thought of him and his race he quickly learned that “[w]hen you’re black, and you’re in a white prep school, control is the paramount thing in your life. You have to be in control - you can’t give anything away, especially how you are really feeling” (Anson 205).
When his mom couldn’t afford to pack the lunches of fancy juice packs and chips, he was known as the stinky poor kid. That 's why I believe eddie highlights the importance of good character and being self-aware of who you are. Character and identity will be part of you permanently even if money is not. Social class and money hide people 's true values from being seen to the world because most people tend to look at others through a social discriminating perspective. Instead of good morals and traits being acknowledged, your social class standing is what people notice.