Smart Summaries

Based on the Book by Robert M. Pirsig

,

• Publisher: Worth Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781504046411
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Robert M. Pirsig's book. Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. This short summary and analysis of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values includes:

• Historical context
• Chapter-by-chapter overviews
• Cast of characters
• Themes and symbols
• Important quotes
• Fascinating trivia
• Glossary of terms
• Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work

About Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is three books in one, including the author's account of a transcontinental journey, his struggle to reconcile both halves of an identity fragmented by his own mental illness, and a rumination on Eastern versus Western philosophy. Now, more than forty years since its original release, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has become a modern classic—the kind of book that challenges readers to step outside of their everyday thoughts and consider some of life's most profound questions through the entertaining lens of a father-son trip. The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.

Summary

PART I

1

The narrator and his son Chris are on a motorcycle trip across the Central and Great Plains, passing through Minnesota with friends John and Sylvia, who are on another motorcycle.

Traveling by motorcycle is completely different from traveling by car. On a bike, one becomes part of the landscape rather than viewing the world through a window. During this trip, the narrator wishes to offer the reader a series of Chautauquas—similar to the traveling educational assemblies that brought culture and entertainment to rural communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

His first Chautauqua is to lament modern humanity’s dependence on—and loathing of—technology. It’s a destructive love-hate relationship. John and Sylvia despise technology even as they’re addicted to it. There are instances of suppressed anger at the role technology plays in their lives, evidenced through anger at a leaky faucet and refusal to do their own motorcycle maintenance, but the narrator does not define them based solely on these feelings.

Need to Know: The narrator’s view of motorcycle maintenance differs diametrically from John’s view. The narrator does all maintenance himself—he knows his bike inside and out; no one will ever approach it with the same care he does. John staunchly believes it’s better to take his bike to a dedicated mechanic. This difference will become a metaphor for their approaches to life.

2

The narrator, Chris, John, and Sylvia see a storm on the horizon as they approach the Dakotas.

The narrator recounts a previous trip during which he and Chris were caught in a terrible thunderstorm. Due to inexperience, they found themselves bogged down with too much baggage, and drenched, with lightning crashing around them. The motorcycle then quit, stranding them in the middle of nowhere. He assumed this was because of the storm, but he was just out of gas.

After getting the motorcycle home, the narrator took it to a shop, resulting in a series of costly repairs by incompetent or rushed mechanics. Because of these experiences, he now espouses the philosophy of thorough maintenance done personally: Know your bike. The narrator applies this experience to his life overall, too. He takes care in what he does and tries to be as knowledgeable as possible. This story really comes back to the adage “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”

Need to Know: The author wishes to explore the idea of taking time and paying attention to your task—doing whatever it is without allowing distractions. This is not yet discussed in detail, but it is one of the central tenets of Zen practice.

3

The group waits out a storm under a tree and eventually stops at a small-town motel.

Chris asks his father if he believes in ghosts. The narrator says no at first, but then he changes his answer. He says that we live in a world of ghosts, which can take the form of teachings and beliefs that no longer have relevance. If something exists only in people’s heads, it is a “ghost.”

He offers the example of the Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity. Before Newton, no one had conceived of gravity; it simply was. Science and the laws of nature and mathematics exist only in the mind.

The narrator is haunted by Phaedrus, a “ghost” that he recognizes as the consciousness that once occupied his body, a previous persona.

Need to Know: The narrator hints at a past that was drastically different from the life he’s living now, begging the question of what happened to change him so profoundly.

4

The narrator provides a list of valuable things to take on motorcycling trips—“Clothing, Personal Stuff, Cooking and Camping Gear, and Motorcycle Stuff”—with brief explanations of why those things are important.

Each machine—each motorcycle—has its own personality, the accumulation of maintenance and experiences that can make two machines of the same model and year feel and behave very differently. The narrator calls these differences “the real object of motorcycle maintenance.” With personal maintenance, the motorcycle becomes a “healthy, good-natured, long-lasting [friend].”

The next morning’s ride is terribly cold, and they pull into the next town suffering from the beginnings of hypothermia. When the weather finally warms and they move on, John laments how difficult it is to photograph stunning natural vistas. Sylvia says that as a child, she once spent half a roll of film trying to photograph the scenery on a family trip. When she got the pictures back, she cried because “there wasn’t anything there.”

Photographs simply can’t capture the beauty of the natural world because they put everything into frames. The narrator equates this to traveling by car, the windows of which automatically frame everything, narrowing our views.

Need to Know: Beauty is in the details: the details of the things carried, the details of each unique machine, the details of the trip.

5

Their journey continues across South Dakota.

In the past, John’s handlebars had grown loose, and no amount of tightening would fix the problem. The narrator suggested using a beer can as a shim, but John balked at the idea of a simple beer can being used to fix his expensive BMW motorcycle. He was more worried about perception than efficacy.

For the narrator, this raises the idea of conflict between visions of reality. There are two realities: one of immediate artistic appearance and one of underlying scientific explanation.

Chris loses his appetite, suffering stomach pains, and exhibits behavioral problems. The narrator says it might be the beginning of mental illness, but he doesn’t trust doctors and psychiatrists because they’re not “kin.” Chris doesn’t need “emotional Band-Aids,” he says.

The ghost of Phaedrus continues to bear down on the narrator’s psyche.

Need to Know: Chapter by chapter, the narrator is building the idea of conflicting worldviews, the artistic and abstract versus the scientific and concrete. Chris’s behavior might be tied into this conflict while also revealing the nature and history of “Phaedrus” one step at a time.

6

The narrator experiences a few snatches of memory from Phaedrus’s experiences, but for the most part, Phaedrus’s entire personality has been expunged somehow.

The conflicting world views above are labeled classical (the scientific, the rational, the reasoning) and the romantic (the artistic, intuitive, imaginative, the inspirational). Each view has its dark flip side: To a person of the classical side, the romantic side can seem frivolous, erratic, and untrustworthy. To a person of the romantic side, the classical can seem dull, oppressive, and over-regimented.

The motorcycle is a perfect example of the classical side, a collection of systems and sub-systems, the explanation of which is “duller than ditchwater.” It does not take into account the humanity that must be present in order to operate one.

Need to Know: Phaedrus was a hyperrational genius of the classical side, a master of slicing ideas and systems apart to understand how they fit together. According to the narrator, he used this skill in a “bizarre, yet meaningful way,” but ultimately, he ended up making himself a victim of his own methods.

7

The next stage of the trip is blistering hot, which starts to take a toll on the motorcycles.

Phaedrus’s temperament made him uniquely skilled at using the “knife” of analysis to cut ideas and systems into infinitely smaller divisions, forever sorting and categorizing. But when “analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.” But something is always created, too, forming a kind of “death-birth community that is neither good nor bad, but just is.” (Phaedrus was, in a sense, killed off and replaced by the narrator.)

At some point in the past,...

Table of contents

• Title
• Disclaimer
• Contents
• Context
• Overview
• Summary
• Cast of Characters
• Themes and Symbols
• Direct Quotes and Analysis
• Trivia
• What’s That Word?
• Critical Response
• About Robert M. Pirsig
• For Your Information
• Bibliography
• Copyright