Finding Meaning and Purpose in Mitch Albom’s, The Five People You Meet In Heaven

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

Everyone knows that the battle of Midway and the battle of Stalingrad were turning points of World War II. Allies defeated Axis Power successfully is not enough to make them be the turning points. The more important reason is that Allies took more advantages to win the war – the view of who will won the war changed. Turning points also exist in everyone's life. They change people's attitude to live. In The Five People You Meet in Heaven written by Mitch Albom, there were many turning points in Eddie's life as well. Eddie's viewpoints of life changed by meeting Marguerite, injuring his leg in the war and saving the girl called Amy or Annie at Ruby Pier.

Turning against the world of drugs and violence, Eddie vows to take the straight and narrow path, even if it means struggling at temporary manual labor jobs. So when he takes a landscaping job for a white man across town thinking that god had finally heard him, the man's truck is stolen from the front of Eddie's apartment causing yet another problem to add on. He hid for hours and days drinking because he really liked his job with the white man and was afraid of what might happen to him. Although getting the truck stolen from him kinda seems like a big deal, it is not because that sort of thing happens daily in the streets of fresno that he lived by, it was almost like that was something normal to him. So when his aunt gets home she reminds him yet another time that his cousin died only this time a gun came with the tortillas she would try and persuade him with the avenge the death of her son.

For example, he also saying how much he does for his family. He acts as though because he does all this work for his family, he deserves more respect from them and they should do as he pleases. Although Eddie constantly reminds everyone of all the work he has done for his family, it is clear that he initially only is concerned for himself. He tries to guilt people into doing what he wants. Near the end of the play, on Catherine’s wedding day, Beatrice tries to encourage Eddie to come with her to the wedding but Eddie think that what he wants is the final word. He tells her that if she attends Catherine’s wedding, she is not allowed back in the house, even though she begs and says it would be in honor of her sister. He cannot condone his niece getting married to Rodolpho, so anyone who is supportive of the marriage means nothing to him. The fact that Eddie would cast out his wife because of his niece’s marriage is a big reason why Eddie is an unsympathetic protagonist. In the beginning of the play, Eddie warns Beatrice and Catherine not to tell anyone about Marco and Rodolpho living with them. He tells a story about Vinny, a kid who snitched on his uncle to the Immigration Bureau and was publicly disgraced and spit on by his own family. When Beatrice asked where he is now, Eddie responds saying that they would never see a guy like that again. He shows no sympathy for him and implies that he

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

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

The tile of the book is “The Five People You Meet in Heaven”. The author of the book is Mitch Albon and it was published in 2003 by Hyperion Books.There are 194 pages total in the book.

Many people share their life experiences with a written form of self expression. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom shares the life story of a man named Eddie, who worked at an amusement work his entire adult life, following his dad's footsteps. Eddie lost his life by saving a girl and pushing her out of the way her. He meets five important people that he did not know would change his life forever. Eddie’s dissatisfaction with working at the amusement park proves that he was put there for a reason, illustrating the theme that you should not take life for granted.

Instead she holded up in her room, smoking meth, drinking [...] Eddie and his 12-year-old sister gabrielle, had no one to guide them”. Edde survived by seeking out new relationships with the motel manager and his cousin Jonathan Levario creating a fresh loving relationship that was not present within his own family even Jonathan later died of acute heroin and meth toxicity. Because loving relationships are one of the best experiences to have, they are also difficult to maintain. Imagine bottles of liquor and bags of cocaine and other drugs Eddie’s parents indulged themselves into satisfying their

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 next person that Eddie meets is his Sargent from the war. He tells Eddie about how he, the Sargent, died, and how that enabled the rest of the company to survive. He told Eddie that it had been him who had shot him, in order to save his life. Eddie had become convinced that he saw someone in a burning building, and to prevent Eddie from going in there and losing his life, the Sargent shot him in the leg.

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 father’s death, eventually the true measure of his character comes forth (Book I: 11).

“But all endings are also beginnings. We don’t know it yet.” This quote is said by the author in the introduction to the readers. The author, Mitch Albom, says that it may be weird to start a story with an ending. But what we don’t know is that the end of one life can mean the start of another. An example of this quote is when Eddie went for his baseball and The Blue Man made the quick decision to drive out of the way to make sure that he didn’t hurt Eddie. This caused the end to The Blue Man’s life, but it was a new beginning for Eddie because he was in a life or death situation and fate chose life for him. So it starts a new beginning that Eddie wouldn’t know about. This quotation

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