Lines 165–173: What is ironic about Tom’s pumping air through the hose while Ruby dives in the marsh? (The deep)

Set in Detroit during the Depression, Doerr tells the affecting story of Tom, meant to die of a weak heart before he is 18, who is cossetted by his mother, but shown a world of possibilities by the flame-haired Ruby. Winner of the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.

Tom is born in 1914 in Detroit, a quarter mile from International Salt. His father is offstage, unaccounted for. His mother operates a six-room, underinsulated boardinghouse populated with locked doors, behind which drowse the grim possessions of itinerant salt workers: coats the colors of mice, tattered mucking boots, aquatints of undressed women, their breasts faded orange. Every six months a miner is laid off, gets drafted, or dies, and is replaced by another, so that very early in his life Tom comes to see how the world continually drains itself of young men, leaving behind only objects—empty tobacco pouches, bladeless jackknives, salt-caked trousers—mute, incapable of memory.

Explanation:

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ethos, logos, and pathos.