"No value judgments"

        I find the main character to be more than frustrating. In all honesty, he has been frustrating me since the beginning of the novel. What bothers me the most about the main character is the fact that he seems to be so judgmental. Despite the video discussion I had with the other people in my group, i fail to see his comments as anything other than judgmental.
        When the narrator begins to really speak on the subject of motorcycle maintenance and the terms romantic and classical he mentions that in motorcycle maintenance "the words good and bad and all their synonyms are completely absent. No value judgments have been expressed..." I found this to be insanely ironic because of all the judgment he has passed on John and Maria, more specifically John for not maintaing his own motorcycle. He makes the "art" of motorcycle maintenance seem a lot more objective that the way he actually carries it out.
        While I found the majority of his talk on the difference between romantic and classical to be engaging, I am still thrown off by Phaedrus. The ideas are still very much credited to Phaedrus, but I still fail to figure out if Phaedrus is a person or a ghost. While in the seventh chapter he seems to take on a much more humanitic form, there is still a significant amount of doubt in my mind as to what he is.  I also found it rather odd how the narrator began to speak of Phaedrus in a more positive manner now where as before he seemed to be utterly terrified of Phaedrus. How is he able to now speak fondly of someone or something that he feared would hurt his son just a chapter before?
-Talia Akerman