This story follows Josh Micheals, an eighteen year old lifeguard at the time of the summer, as he recalled his last summer working at Pirate’s Point. He is exceedingly vain and superficial about nearly everyone, including himself, with comments about himself being things like, “I could do no wrong.” (p. 424) and comments about others hardly being any different in their bluntness. All of this was to say that besides his nightmare, Mrs. Lovenheim, and his fixation on Billy Mandel, a kid who was the only one to drown on the beach, he doesn’t delve into any deep sort of thought about his life outside of the beach. Even the mention that his dad died suddenly was brushed aside with a strange impersonality and brashness.
Josh’s fixation on these matters were the driving factors of this story, and they all play into each other in a surprising way. His nightmare was scarily on-the-nose, and it’s insinuated that in his nightmares that he was in Billy’s place. One minute he was sitting playing with his bucket and shovel on the beach, but behind him the sea loomed and surged. There’s this fear of dying, or rather, having someone die while he’s on duty. He asked out Peggy Mandel, and right after kissing her he abruptly asked her about how Billy died; there was no hint that Peggy would want to talk about this, and yet he selfishly pressed on with the empty excuse that he wanted to do his job better.
This fixation on drowning, dying, or whatever it may be classified as culminates in the climax of the story where the young daughter of a former lifeguard who was chummy with Josh throughout the story choked on something and was dying. It wasn’t the ocean, but it was the negligence of responsibility from someone (Becky’s father, Ric) who was entrusted to keep these kinds of accidents from happening. There’s an interesting parallel to be drawn from Ric, with both of them being lifeguards who are clearly superficial, who are both content with people at the beach and yet frustrated by the people there, Billy drowning which happened during Ric’s shift, and Becky suffocating under Josh’s watch. Regardless of the foils/parallels between the two of them, Mrs. Lovenheim who Josh had described over and over as watching him ironically was the person to save Becky’s life. This story does extremely well with the principle of Chekhov’s gun, all of the climax was set up and built upon in subtle ways up until they were all woven together in the height of the story.
You mentioned how Josh Michaels’s nightmares were somewhat parallel to the events that occurred. I think the narrator’s dreams could tell us a lot about the narrator himself, considering his unreliability as a narrator. After all, as you pointed out, he “…could do no wrong” (Morris 424). Unless Michaels narrated his own nightmares with that same unreliability, we knew who we were dealing with. He was not only an inexorable, teenage, self-prophesied Captain America, but a worried young man who possessed the same vulnerability as those around him, despite his role as the one to protect them.