Mrs. Dupuy's Reading Room

Life Connections

                In the novel “The Five People You Meet in Heaven”, it says,” That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.” To me this means that in some way, shape, or form all life is connected. In the novel, Eddie, the main character, meets five people ranging from relatives to strangers. One of these strangers, the blue man, makes the point that there is more than one way to view an event. An example he uses is how he dies. “Take one story, view it from two different angles. It is the same day, same moment, but one angle ends happily, at an arcade, with the little boy with tawny pants dropping pennies into the Erie Digger machine, and the other ends badly, in a city morgue…” By him saying this, Eddie realizes the connection between him and the blue man. Another example of this is with Eddie’s fifth person, the little girl from Vietnam. From Eddie’s perspective, he is burning a base which he views as a place of evil where he was held captive. From the little girl’s perspective, her mother hid her in the base because she thought of it as a safe haven from the soldiers that she thought were going to harm her and the little girl who was burned in the camp. Through points like these, the story shows the connections between Eddie and the other characters. Each character also had an impact on Eddie which changed him by causing a kind of ripple effect in his life. This is similar to throwing a stone into a still pond and watching each ripple lead to another.