In "A Sound of Thunder", Eckels is apparently a rich, leisured hunter who pursues rare experiences and novelties. This leads him to purchase an expensive time safari, in which he will be taken into the distant past via a time machine, to hunt animals that are extinct in the modern era.
Two significant elements flesh out some of Eckels' personality; his reliance on money to get what he wants, and his lack of insight.
His relationship with money seems indistinct at first - we merely know that he has paid a large amount of it to purchase the trip. We might assume that a person to whom money is more significant might have better researched what he was purchasing, but Eckels is full of questions and apparent ignorance, which may indicate that he simply pursued the novelty offered by the time safari company without a second thought. Later, his true relationship with money is revealed when he offers to buy his way into the good graces of the safari leaders after he has violated their rules and probably altered the timeline, not realizing that money is an irrelevant compensation for such an act.
Eckels is basically rich but ignorant, and like some of Bradbury's other stories such as "The Veldt" he serves as a warning about allowing the comfort, convenience and novelty of technology and civilized lifestyles to overwhelm and stagnate our self-control and sensibility.
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