The Five People You Meet In Heaven, written by MItch Albom, has many symbols throughout the novel. Eddie, an eighty three year old maintenance worker at Ruby Pier, one day loses his life when trying to save a little girl from a falling ride. After he dies he awakens in the afterlife, or heaven. He is then reunited with people he loved and the strangers he has never met. The five people he meets have impacted him throughout his life in their own way. The three most important symbols in the novel are the ferris wheel at Ruby Pier, his own birthdays, which are shown in many chapters of the novel, and the ocean. These three symbols create a sense of emotions, in their own way.
Ruby Pier has always been a very important part of Eddie’s life. It is where his family went many times, his dad worked there, and even he worked there. The Pier is a place where Eddie experiences good and bad situations. Eddie’s life is full of joy, risks, and lost opportunities, just like the rides at Ruby Pier. At the beginning the reader only sees Ruby Pier as a place Eddie failed to get
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It shows the wreckage and new beginnings in Eddie’s life. Ruby, who Ruby Pier was named after, watchs her husband become so caught up in building the perfect park on the oceanside, that when it burns down, his dreams burn down, too. The ocean is where Eddie and Marguerite first fall in love and renew their love many years later. New beginnings were opened up to them two times, while at the ocean. Eddie’s father also caught pneumonia while saving his good friend from drowning in the ocean during a storm. When Eddie is in heaven he sees all the families at Ruby Pier from the ocean. As he is in the ocean his body is being “washed away… went all the pain and weariness he ever held inside him, every scar, every wound, every bad memory” (193). The ocean symbolizes wreckage and new beginnings in not only Eddie’s life but many others as