The Motorbike
Andy is a young, patient and nice man. He works a lot to afford his motorbike and expensive clothes. He is confidence and good to ride bikes which express itself by the way he rode his bike round and round the yard. He is ‘free’, he does what he wants and he lives his life without restrictive measures and without worries.
The reason why Ray and Eleanor have quite different opinions about Andy is because Ray knows how it is to be a boy like Andy. As the text says in line tree to five, Ray would have loved to live his life like Andy’s; young, wild and free but it is too late for him now when he got a wife, a daughter and a decent job. So Ray sees how he wanted to have lived his life when Andy is near. “He often day-dreamed about the life he might have lived, the actor he might have been, the drunken fights he might have been in! And the women!”. On the other side is Eleanor which probably sees it from Penny’s point of view because she also has been a girl like Penny who might have had a crush on big, wild youth once in her life. Maybe this has made her much more careful about what she would let Penny do and therefore sets more strict measures because she knows just how wrong it can go. And as the narrator in the story says “Eleanor, his wife, wanted to keep the girl close to her”, if the girl, penny gets a boyfriend like Andy, Eleanor would probably not see her as much as she is used too and then Eleanor would start to lose Penny bit for bit, time for time.
Penny is described as a 17 year old teenage girl, who is conscientious, polite and has an understanding of her family, she also study hard because she took A-levels.
The story uses a third person narrator. It is not an omniscient third person narrator but instead a limited narrator since the narrator only knows everything about the principal characters from the story and not the subordinate characters. This is more limiting, but it increases tension and intrigue since the reader discovers things at the same time as the narrator.
Ray’s motorbike trip will take him to wherever his hearth desire. He wants to make up the fun and excitement he missed in his youth. He will probably drive for some hours and just enjoy the feeling of youth, free and without responsibility. But when he suddenly realize that he is not in his youth anymore, he got responsibility to his wife and daughter and to his job, he needs to act mature and mellowed and he got to be a good example for his daughter, then I think he will return to his home, his wife, his daughter and her boyfriend, Andy, because he knows that it is where he belong.
The central theme of this story is, live your life while you can, it is the only one you have, do not waste your time by doing what you are supposed to do, rather do what your hearth want you to.