Summary of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was published in 1974. Told through the frame of a long motorcycle trip across America, the book explores life and how to best live it. The world of ideas takes center stage, providing both the conflict and resolution for living such a balanced approach to life.
Perspectives from Eastern and Western philosophy and religion are referenced, highlighted, and explored, and through this exploration, the narrator addresses the pivotal question of how to pursue technology in a way that enriches human life as opposed to degrading it. Told through first person narrative, the book parallels the motorcycle trip and all of its accompanying trials and tribulations with the ideas, trials, and tribulations of the narrator’s own past life, ideas which come into contact with the present.
In
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the two protagonists are actually one person. The narrator is a lightly fictionalized version of the author, Robert Pirsig, who is taking a motorcycle trip with his son and another couple. The narrator speaks in the first person and uses the present tense. Phaedrus is the name of the narrator’s alter ego. His story is told in the third person and the past tense. (In some editions of the book, the Phaedrus sections use a different font from the narrator’s.) As the narrator describes him, Phaedrus is the person he used to be before suffering a mental breakdown in mid-career. By the book’s end, the two characters begin to merge into a single individual.
The motorcycle trip starts in Minneapolis, Minnesota and concludes near San Francisco, CA. The narrator and his son, Chris, are accompanied by a couple, the Sutherlands. As a contrast to the narrator, John and Sylvia Sutherland represent people who are uncomfortable with technology. They feel oppressed by it and use motorcycle trips to escape. At the same time, however, they are dependent on technology. This conflict hints at a larger conflict in society and life. The narrator aims to explore this conflict with technology and get to its root.
The group travels together to Bozeman, Montana, which is an important location related to the narrator’s teaching career and unusual past. At this point in the book, the Sutherlands return home, and the narrator and his son continue the trip after undertaking a hiking expedition in the mountains outside Bozeman. The hiking trip includes significant explorations of the inner world of spiritual development and of the narrator’s difficult relationship with his son, thus fleshing out the narrator’s past ideas and helping incorporate them into his present.
Throughout his travels, the narrator weaves together observations about life, diving into the struggles and backstory of a shadowy character called Phaedrus. These are, of course, mixed with the day-to-day details of the trip, showing a resonance between the two “worlds” being presented as ideas and thoughts build upon one another. Phaedrus is introduced with reluctance, and there is a mystery surrounding his relationship to the narrator. As the book unfolds, however, this mystery is resolved, and readers learn that Phaedrus is the name that the narrator has given to himself to represent his life before his nervous breakdown and shock therapy. This therapy resulted in a new personality.
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