59 pages • 1 hour read
Robert M. PirsigZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1974A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 22-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part III
Chapter 22 Summary
The next morning, the narrator and Chris bid farewell to the DeWeeses, who wanted them to stay longer. The narrator, however, is anxious to get going and to continue with his thoughts. He wants to begin a new Chautauqua by talking about a person he has studied extensively for this talk, an “eminent scientific man” named Jules Henri Poincaré. Poincaré was a philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and physicist. The narrator mentions that as Phaedrus was a poor scholar, he never ventured to see if others had traced the same inroads he had into Quality. Poincaré seems to come closest. He was also interested in testing the limits scientific reasoning. His basis was with Euclidian geometry, and as various mathematical axioms were discovered during his lifetime, the revelations completely changed the purportedly rational system of mathematics. Poincaré dealt with the apparent predicament, as well as what the predicament indicated, that—like Phaedrus had discovered—there can actually be an infinite number of hypotheses, by proposing that some facts were better than others based on attributes. This was in fact similar to Phaedrus’s ideas concerning Quality.
The narrator and Chris stop in Missoula, and then continue westward. They camp on an abandoned logging road and Chris goes off to explore, then returns and admits he has diarrhea. After cleaning his clothes and returning to camp, Chris asks his father what he should be when he grows up. The narrator just tells him to be “honest.” The two reach camp and sleep.
Chapter 23 Summary
The narrator’s recurring nightmare returns and is described in detail. A glass door separates him from his wife and two sons. The narrator realizes that his wife is grieving and that the glass door is actually the door of his own coffin, a sarcophagus. Chris asks him to open the door again, but a shadowy figure tells him he cannot open the door, that the dead are not able to talk. When the narrator tries to reach for the door, the figure moves towards him menacingly. The narrator calls out to Chris and he seems to hear him, which anger the shadowy figure. He tells Chris to meet him at the bottom of the ocean, and then the shadowy figure draws a curtain over the narrator’s view. He then finds himself in a deserted city, which he must now walk through alone.
Chapter 24 Summary
The narrator awakens from the nightmare, disoriented. He lets Chris sleep a bit more and goes for a jog, looking at the physical environment. After a bit of exercise, he returns and packs up their items, then wakes Chris. As the two head out, the narrator begins a Chautauqua that explains his earlier thought about caring for what one does in more detail. Now that he has explained a Quality, which is necessary to understand everything else, he wants to return to the day-to-day practice of his thoughts by showing how one can care. He wants to bring all of his ideas—“Quality is the Buddha,” “Quality is scientific reality,” and “Quality is the goal of Art”—together by using motorcycle maintenance again to explain them. In this way, he hopes to shed light on the plight of technological hopelessness that plagues both technologists and non-technologists.
The narrator and Chris stop at a lodge for breakfast and Chris wants to write a letter to his mother. After a while, he realizes he does not know what to say and asks the narrator for help, which amuses the narrator. In this sense, Chris is like one of Phaedrus’ students, not knowing where to begin. He explains to Chris how he should just write the ideas he wants to explore down in no particular order, then return to them to flesh them out. It is because he is trying to do everything at once that nothing gets done.
Back on the road, the narrator continues the Chautauqua, focusing first on the problems that cause mechanics to become stuck. “Stuckness” is a state of being the narrator argues is caused by traditional reason. It occurs when there is no hypothesis for solving a problem. As he has been alluding to, the solution to this state of being is to adopt a more flexible approach to the problem, as opposed to trying to solve it from a purely classic standpoint. When Quality is used to approach the issue, a mechanic—or any person—can become unstuck from rigid conceptions of the world and how things are supposed to be. This broadening of awareness will lead to a solution to the problem at hand.
The narrator and Chris prepare to descend into a desert with countless hairpin turns, and when they finally do, the narrator looks back up and sees that the cars all look like ants.
Chapters 22-24 Analysis
Quality appears in other fields as a reminder of its universal presence. The narrator studied Euclidian geometry and Poincaré, who showed that though there are an infinite number of hypotheses, some are better than others based on the attributes they have.
“Stuckness” is addressed as a problem resulting from lack of Quality. When a person can only look at a problem in a rigid view, stuckness happens. When repairing a motorcycle, for example, if a mechanic has a rigid view of what needs to be done, the solution might never be found. Allowing Quality into the work means that other viewpoints are allowed in as well. Quality as such expands outward from the traditional reasoning people are used to approaching problems with.
The recurring dream again returns, and symbolizes the extent to which the narrator’s separation from Chris is damaging their relationship. It is now just the two traveling together, and with all of his focus on the Chautauqua and dualistic thinking, his dreams are also alerting him to the fact that he is struggling with his own past.
