Summary of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. Summary of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig 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. Grab a copy of this book now!