Sixty Cups of Coffee repeats the word truth multiple times, mostly in Rickie’s inner monologue. Rickie is searching for the truth and has become obsessed with finding the truth to the point where his inner thoughts repeat that word. This repetition shows his only motivation for putting his life on the line to drink sixty cups of coffee is finding the truth about what happens to your body. He wants to experience the truth for himself, he can not just accept what he is told, he needs to feel and see it in front of his eyes. Another repetition is characters saying that he is going to die, or kill himself drinking sixty cups of coffee. Rickie is the first one to say the word death in his explanation to the audience as to why he is drinking sixty cups of coffee in a row. After Rickie almost every character mentions that he is going to kill himself drinking all those cups of coffee. This repetition is foreshadowing for the outcome of this experiment, but also shows how closed minded many of the people in the diner are as majority write him off as going to die when he mentions that he is going to drink sixty cups of coffee, they do not even ponder if he is going to live through it. On the opposite end, we have the abnormalities of the kid and the one man in the bet, they think he is going to live, or at least do not write Rickie off as knocking on death’s door. The man is going against the other man in the bet, so he does have a stake in Rickie living, but he is one of the only characters who does not say that Rickie is going to die. The kid does not say that Rickie is going to die, but he also does not say that Rickie is going to die, the kid stands in the middle trying to understand why Rickie is doing this.
There is a contrast between the adults and the child when it comes to seeing and understanding Rickie. The child is the first and it seems the only person who understands why Rickie is doing this and why he is willing to put his life on the line to find the truth. Children are naturally curious because they are still actively learning about the world, and Rickie seems to still have some of this childhood curiosity in him to which he is putting to use to find out if death is what really happens when someone drinks sixty cups of coffee in a row. If all the other adults in the diner have lost their childhood curiosity, they obviously will not understand Rickie like the one child will because the child still has all that curiosity.
The two men involved in the bet are an interesting anomaly within the adults of the diner. They are more invested in Rickie’s coffee drinking right away, and continue that extreme investment until Rickie dies. They never get disinterested, they keep upping the states of their bet, and are so invested that they follow Rickie to the bathroom to listen to him use the bathroom. Like Rickie, they get focused on one thing and have to see it all the way through, but they are the only other characters shown to invest in something so greatly that they will stop at nothing to see it to the end. The mother and waitress stay there throughout the whole situation, but they are not interested enough to follow Rickie to the bathroom, or even participate in the bet.This work shows the similarities between the extreme pursuit of truth and child-like curiosity. It puts into perspective the difference between those who are not curious the way children are, and those who are by showing all the different stages in one place interested in one event taking place.
