Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

I hate saying this, but I just didn’t get this book. It was written in 1974, and has become the best-selling philosophy book in history. But it totally escaped me.

It’s the story of a Narrator and his son, Chris, who embark on a two-week motorcycle trip from Minneapolis to Northern California. They have some friends along for a while, and they stop in Montana to hike and visit the college where the Narrator used to teach. Along the way, the Narrator philosophizes about life and something he calls Quality.

I say “something he calls Quality,” because that’s an entire philosophy of its own which I found basically incomprehensible.

Consider:

“Quality,” or “value,” as described by Pirsig, cannot be defined because it empirically precedes any intellectual construction of it, namely due to the fact that quality exists always as a perceptual experience before it is ever thought of descriptively or academically.

…yeah.

The book is semi-autobiographical. The author, Robert Pirsig, was a professor at Montana State. While teaching here, he had a mental breakdown and underwent electroshock therapy.

This sets up the other strange part of the book: all throughout the trip, the Narrator speaks of “Phaedrus,” who is supposedly a ghost, but turns out to be the Narrator himself, pre-electroshock. The Narrator is apparently haunted by his former self, and the climax of the book is the recollection of when he fell apart, underwent therapy, and Phaedrus was born.

I think I’m understanding this all correctly, because I did quite a bit of meta-reading around it. I spent lots of time on Wikipedia, and I actually read an entire, chapter-by-chapter summary of the book after reading the actual book.

The book does actually discuss motorcycle maintenance a bit in the beginning. His friends that are with him at the beginning of the book have an entirely different approach to how they purchase and care for motorcycles and the author spends some time discussing that. I actually read this after Shop Class as Soul Craft thinking they would be similar, but they really weren’t (though Shop Class does quote from this book in places).

I actually tried to read this 14 years ago, but gave up. When I went to buy it, I found that I already had it in my Kindle account. And up until I gave up back in 2012, I had high-lighted quite a few passages, which was kind of weird to see so many years later.

I powered through this time, though I don’t think I’m any better for it.

Book Data

Author

Robert M. Pirsig

Year

2006

Pages

540

Acquired

Not recorded

Open Library

OL827357W

Wikipedia

Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance

• I have read this book. According to my records, I completed it on October 5, 2026.
• A softcover copy of this book is currently in my home library.