Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Ending -- Uh, Spoilers.

[Ace309]

I just finished this yesterday, and the ending just came up and slapped me.

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The line “That’s true. I never realized it. All this time he’s been staring into my back.” was just amazing. For Chris to have spent the entire trip like that, while his father was having these epiphanies, was just such a great way to end things.

More importantly, though, I think the afterword (I have the edition from 1985 or so, the paperback with the pink cover). Honestly, I don’t see how the book could have had the impact it did without the afterword, particularly Chris’s death.[/spoiler]

Any thoughts?

[Shodan]

I didn’t know that Chris was dead.

Did he commit suicide? That would be what I expected, from the way his father f***ed with his head.

Regards,
Shodan

[Ace309]

Actually, he was murdered coming out of the San Francisco Zen Center right before his 23rd birthday.

[AHunter3]

The “book” portion of the book – the narrative – never did much for me. If it were not for the philosophical seminar on epistemology and metaphysics that is wrapped in the narrative, I would have long since forgotten that I had ever read it.

The narrative is essential for the sake of continuity with his philosphy.

Pirsig:

The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn’t the way it ever is. People should see that it’s never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It’s never been anything else, ever, but you can’t get that across in an essay.

You’ll recall his discussion of classical mode and the knife of distinction, yes?

Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife. We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts.

And his criticism of conventional “pure” classical-mode writing that discards romantic notions of quality?

Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. …

What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand for its own sake… That is what Phaedrus, the poor surgeon, was trying to do.

To understand what he was trying to do it’s necessary to see that part of the landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, is a figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape without seeing this figure is not to see the landscape at all.

He could hardly make this point effectively in his own thesis if it were written in “pure” classical mode, right? So his story of the author himself in the story’s present doing the motorcycle trip and sorting all this philosophical sand out in his mind – that and the backstory of himself (Phaedrus) working it out the first time as an academic and getting in too deep – provides the landscape and you get to see him in the act of sorting the sand, coming up with the theory of meaning and understanding and knowledge that, if it were written in purely classical mode, would constitute his thesis.

Which is to say that it is interesting and useful (perhaps even important) to know for the additional light it casts on his theories, but I can’t imagine reading the book for the entertainment value of the narrative.