Mot Time

MOT Time

The story is about Jenny, she is a single mom and almost 31 years old. Her parents are divorced and the family is divided. Her father, Victor, lives with a ‘new’ younger girl called Annette. Victor, who is retired, spends his time doing MOT tests and Jenny’s car is due. The relationship between Jenny and her father is awkward, they don’t know what to say to each other and they aren’t much interested in one another’s lives, but Jenny, unlike her sisters, remain in contact with Victor.

The passage described in the short story takes place at Victor and Annette’s house. The house reminds Jenny of the house that Victor and her mom used to have. They are outside and Jenny notices the garden, it’s very tidy and nice. It’s a warm summer day in July and because Jenny has to collect her son Omar, who is just started in school, is it probably in the early afternoon. Jenny is stopping by because Victor fixed her car and she just has to collect the keys and drive home. When she arrives at the door Victor asks her in for a cold drink and a little chat. During the visit Jenny compares Annette to herself, and she finds that Annette is not nearly as good a woman as she is, Annette is gaining weight and letting herself go, but what Jenny doesn’t know is that Annette isn’t gaining weight because she is letting herself go, she is pregnant with twins. The news of the pregnancy shocks Jenny to the core, she hurries out the door but in her hastiness she notices that her father is wearing his old wedding ring and that interests her, because why would he be doing that, as he was the one who left and not the one who got left. So she asks him why. Victor says that one shouldn’t always judge a book by its cover, the answer puzzles Jenny but she doesn’t think more of it. As she gets in her car she notices one more thing, the mole on her father’s shoulder, this reminds her of her childhood, and she starts crying, there is something she wants to say but she can’t.

I will use some of Freud’s theories to interpret this short story. Freud believed that every human has three psychological levels, the super-ego, the ego and the id. The super-ego is where values and norms are stored, the ego is where rationality is and it’s the aware part and finally the id is where the lusts and the things you have suppressed are stored. There is a barrier between the id and the ego; this means that suppressed thoughts generally aren’t allowed to come in to awareness. There are only few exceptions, for example in a shocked state the barrier might break.

Jenny keeps coming back to Victor because she has a need