“This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun.”

This is the sentence that begins the novel. This sentence sets up one of the themes of the novel, that death is not the end. For Eddie, death is simply the beginning of understanding the life he lived and why things happened the way they did. It is also the beginning of understanding the people who populated his life and how their existence interacted with his own.

“The last hour of Eddie’s life was spent, like most of the others, at Ruby Pier, an amusement park by a great gray ocean.”

Ruby Pier is one of the major settings of the novel, and it also sets the tone of Eddie’s life—at least how he saw the tone of his life. Eddie felt his life was mundane and pointless, each day just like the day before. The gray ocean illustrates a sad, melancholy existence without the colors of happiness and pleasure.

“Eddie’s job was ‘maintaining’ the rides, which really meant keeping them safe. Every afternoon, he walked the park, checking on each attraction, from the Tilt-A-Whirl to the Pipeline Plunge. He looked for broken boards, loose bolts, worn-out steel. Sometimes he would stop, his eyes glazing over, and people walking past thought something was wrong. But he was listening, that’s all. After all these years he could hear trouble, he said, in the spits and stutters and thrumming of the equipment.”

Eddie’s job description shows how important this job is to Eddie and how seriously he takes his responsibility, despite insisting that he hates his job and feels stuck in the life it has forced him to live. Eddie is very good at his job and has kept the park running safely for many, many years, and this says something about his character that he does take his job this seriously.