61 pages • 2 hours read
Sarah DessenAlong for the Ride
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Biking
Biking is a symbol of freedom, letting go, and determination. It functions as a thematic plot ingredient for both Eli and Auden’s character arcs. For Eli, biking was his passion and escape, an activity he loved that could earn him a living. Eli spent many hours biking and practicing his skills—until his closest friend Abe died in a car accident. As the driver, Eli blamed himself for Abe’s death, withdrawing into himself, becoming less social, and giving up biking. After losing his best friend and fellow professional biker, Eli’s drive faded. He couldn’t release the guilt, blame, and sorrow he felt over Abe’s death, despite the fact it wasn’t his fault.
Months after Abe’s death, Eli starts riding and competing again. Since meeting Auden and discussing determination with her, he has the renewed spirit to be competitive, letting go of his heavy grief to enjoy the freedom and childhood bliss of riding. Like her, Eli missed out on an activity he always enjoyed, and he must be brave like Auden to get back on his bike and enter competitions. This is his quest. When Eli wins the competition he attends on the night of the Beach Bash, he discovers that biking isn’t the same as before; instead of following a professional career, he chooses to let biking be his hobby, his release. He tells Auden that he wants to retire on top after he wins a competition, rather than leaving the sport by “just dropping off the map like that” (376). Eli also implies that he won the competition in Abe’s honor, and he’s finally ready to let go of his grief.
For Auden, biking is a symbol of regaining her lost childhood, learning to persevere even when she isn’t talented at something, and earning Eli’s love. She claims to know how to ride a bike, but her memory isn’t clear about it. When she talks to Hollis about the subject, he says she rode a bike once in the driveway, fell off, and their dad sold it a few months later. She considers that her memory of biking must have been incorrect.
She decides to learn to ride after she and Eli part ways. With Maggie and Adam’s help, Auden learns to enjoy the speed and adrenaline of biking. She sits on Adam’s handlebars to start, and he pedals quickly so Auden can enjoy the ride: “‘It’s like flying,’ I said. [...] We were really going now, the boards clacking beneath us, and I leaned back farther, letting the wind hit my face. [...] Despite my worry about falling, and my various embarrassments, I felt a strange sense of exhilaration, and I closed my eyes” (308). Auden overcomes her worries, accepts the pain of “failing,” and feels proud to showcase that she accomplished this task on her own, a skill that her love for Eli influenced. Auden wants to show Eli her positive changes and how she learned to ride a bike not only for him but for herself, completing her journey of growing into her own person with a balance of both work and play and persevering even in the face of failure. Eli is proud of her and happy that they can share time biking together in the future.
The Best of Times Picture Frame
The Best of Times frame symbolizes allowing oneself to have fun and bravely tackle new experiences. It functions as a significant catalyst at first and then a reminder for Auden to keep pursuing the next adventure. The frame is a gift from her brother Hollis that spurs her to spend the summer visiting her father, Heidi, and Thisbe. Unlike Hollis, Auden has never been the extroverted, bold, spontaneous type, so she doesn’t have a picture (like him at the Taj Mahal) to put in the frame: “Something in these words, and his easy, smiling face, reminded me of the chatter of my old friends as they traded stories from the school year. Not about classes, or GPAs, but other stuff, things that were as foreign to me as the Taj Mahal, gossip and boys and getting your heart broken. They probably had a million pictures that belonged in this frame, but I didn’t have a single one” (18). Auden considers a change of scenery and attempts to make memories worth framing over the summer.
After meeting Eli and developing her quest, Auden recognizes that she hasn’t done much in her life besides academic work. Her parents’ ideas of fun were symphonies, lectures, readings, and work meetings. Auden was never involved in sports or non-academic clubs, didn’t have any close friends at her private school (which was so competitive that they only discussed coursework), and never traveled.
She finally gains the experiences she’s missed out on—developing meaningful friendships with girls, bowling, delivering papers, working as an accountant, dancing and kissing Eli at a club, falling in love, going to parties, food fights, the Beach Bash, babysitting her sister, and learning to ride a bike. All these experiences inform Auden’s growth, and the frame is a symbol of her awakening as a more courageous, open, and experienced person.
At the end of the book, Auden has the frame in her college dorm room, but she doesn’t know which picture to put in it:
But I couldn’t decide if I should use a shot from the prom, or one of the several I’d taken with Maggie, Esther, and Leah in our last days in Colby. Maybe, I thought, I should use the one of me with Hollis and Laura, the day they officially announced their engagement. I had so many choices that in the end, I just chose to leave it empty until I was absolutely sure (379).
Unlike at the novel’s start, she has many photos she deems worth putting in the frame. She decides to leave it blank in anticipation of the best being yet to come, a “best” she never would have experienced if she didn’t leave her comfort zone.
The Wave Machine
The white noise wave machine and its “fake” ocean sound help Thisbe to sleep. The machine is a means of ending Thisbe’s tantrums, but it also symbolizes learning not to judge harshly and the power of speaking up. Though the machine helps Thisbe become quiet and sleep, the wave sound at first annoys Auden, who judges the machine as an absurd, unnecessary item—especially when the real ocean waves can be heard from the backyard.
Auden and her mother judge non-scholarly activities to be unimportant—from shopping to gossiping to sports. Stereotypically feminine activities, such as manicures, female venting sessions, and clothes shopping, are deemed frivolous and unimportant. Thus, both Auden and Victoria misjudge Heidi. When she visits, Victoria even comments that Heidi’s boutique is like “a giant vagina” (117), aghast at the perfumes, bikinis, luxury creams and lotions, and skimpy clothes in the shop.
Similarly, when Auden meets Maggie, Esther, and Leah, she judges all of them, particularly Maggie, as having no intellectual depth. She thinks they are weak “girly girls.” Maggie helps Auden enter the world of girls by teaching her that femininity is not a simple concept. She shows Auden that women are multi-faceted through her brilliant understanding of finance when Esther needs a loan for a new car, her literary knowledge when she knows the myth of Thisbe, and the fact she is attending the same prestigious university as Auden. As with the wave machine, Auden harshly judged Heidi, Maggie, and the other girls based on appearances. She didn’t understand their deeper value.
As a consistent backdrop to Auden’s adventures, the machine’s noise also parallels her learning to speak up. Auden is quiet and stoic. She needs to learn how to speak up for her wants and needs and to become noisy like the wave machine and her little sister. As a child, Auden was expected to be seen and not heard, and this quality sticks with her. She doesn’t share her feelings or thoughts until she learns to value her independence. In the beginning, Auden doesn’t mention that she notices the grad student’s glasses at their house. Later, Auden uses her voice to refuse her mom’s decision for her to live in a solitary dorm room. She also implies that she knows about her mother’s lover, who accompanies her when she visits and whom Auden notices in the hotel pool. With Eli, she is brave enough to admit she was wrong to end things and that she used to give up on things when she didn’t get them right the first time. Though she is speechless when her dad moves to the hotel, Auden later confronts him over the phone by stating he needs to stop giving up and repair his relationship with Heidi and Thisbe. Auden buys a wave machine for her dorm room, which lessens her longing for Thisbe and acts as a reminder of its symbolism in her life.
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