Running on Empty - Robert Phillips the

Running on Empty - Robert Phillips The reader suspects upon consuming the first six lines of the poem that the speaker was a typical rebellious teenager. One, his father was not eager for him to have the car, suggesting he wasn't dependable. Two, with the fuel gauge "dipping, dipping..." he was playing your basic "chicken" game (albeit with himself, rather than with another teenager). Teenagers hang out together, so it's a sign that he was a loner.

Or, just plain reckless, which teenagers are, since they have little experience from which to learn real fear. And it's a universal given that teens do anything to avoid following specific parental directions, like "Always keep the tank half full." And so our speaker not only allowed the gauge to go under half full - he pushed the envelope to "fumes" in the tank, and in life. It appears in lines 7 through 16 that perhaps all he had in the world was this vehicle to prove his fledgling manhood.

Perhaps he failed at athletics, or at academics, or failed at love. Why? Perhaps because he desires to succeed at something hitherto undone: push harder on the pedal - and on his luck - than others would / could do. But suspicion of his teenage typicality turns out possibly to be incorrect in line 16, when he invokes the "The Furies" (Aeschylus: The sins of the parent rest on the head of the child, who seeks vengeance and expiation). Most wild teen boys don't allude to Greek tragedies with vengeance themes.

And in lines 17-18 he was once stranded, but irony enters here, as he also experienced a "white night" [White night - full moon? Suggesting lunacy? That it never really got dark and scary? Or was he a "white knight" in his own mind, because he won his war with the gas gauge, and that's his victory?]. His motionless auto panicked him briefly. Then the suggestion in the final line is that, notwithstanding a fresh full tank, and.