Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

A Game of Cards

A strong allegory in the book is a game of cards. Card games maintain a balance of chance and skill. Chance governs the cards players receive, but skill directs how they play them. The author plays a game with the reader, laying out his hand in chapters named as cards in ascending order within suits. The numerical value of a whole pack of cards can be counted as 364, which with the addition of one for the joker makes 365, the number of days in the year. This is the period of Ed's life covered in the book. Likewise, fifty-two cards represent the fifty-two weeks in a year, and the four suits represent the four seasons. The sender plays a game with Ed Kennedy in which he stacks the odds in Ed's favor. Ed gets dealt all the aces, the most valuable cards, and then the joker, the wild card that can take on any value needed. The sender of the aces has a master strategy that unfolds over twelve interventions with higher and higher stakes for Ed as the missions become more personal to him. Ed plays his cards just right and wins honor, purpose, and love. The message of the allegory is that destiny deals one’s hand in life, but the outcome depends on how the hand is played. 

Violence 

From the opening scene of the book, violence is a feature of the setting. The author situates the narrative in a run-down community outside an urban area, with high rates of alcoholism, teenage pregnancy, and poverty. People expect to fight their own battles without involving the police. This survival mentality of the townspeople gives rise to nonchalant dark humor. When Ed and his three best friends are being held at gunpoint during a bank holdup, they incur the robber’s wrath by mocking his ineptitude. When the so-called hitmen Daryl and Keith visit Ed to rough him up, they raid his refrigerator first. Ed, inexperienced with violence, resorts to aggression for two interventions. First, he threatens to kill the rapist with a gun supplied by the sender of the aces. Then, he beats Gavin Rose unconscious. In both cases, the results prove to Ed that physical brutality is not worth the potential for the harmful blowback: in the case of the rapist, integrity restrains Ed from killing the man. In Gavin’s case, Ed endures a revenge beating worse than the one he gave Gavin.

The Fourth Wall 

A convention of dramatic realism called “the fourth wall” is best understood by visualizing a stage performance. An imaginary wall separates the audience from the performers, which the audience can see through but the actors cannot. The actors maintain their focus on their imaginary world, ignoring the audience. This fourth wall only becomes apparent when the performers address the audience directly and this device is called “breaking the fourth wall.” At two crucial moments in the narrative, Ed as the narrator breaks the fourth wall by addressing the reader. The first instance dramatizes the emotional conflict Ed must resolve in the intervention with the rapist. He puts the reader into his shoes to contextualize the murder he contemplates as both a moral and practical problem. This first-person aside also provides a clue to the author of the book. In the second instance, Ed explains to the reader in the novel’s last paragraph his new appreciation of the sender's purpose in his machinations. Ed identifies not as the messenger but instead as the message, an object lesson that proves anyone can be an agent of change.