First 500 words

            Mankind, especially the brightest of us, is perpetually searching for answers. We thrive under the idea that we are superior because of our capacity to create and discover. However, as the sum of mankind’s search for truth is taken into account, each truth we learn and all progress made in the name of knowledge seems to only bring about the conclusion that some things are just out of our reach. In other words; the more we know, the more realize we don’t know, and the more we realize we can never know.

This is a terrifying conclusion come to, one that often only plagues that most intelligent of us.  Amongst the most intelligent would be Phaedrus, later found to be the narrator of the novel, and the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, who’s life this autobiographical novel is based on.

Robert Pirsig at the age of nine, was recorded to have an IQ of 170, just as the Phaedrus did in the novel, and as such skipped several grades and graduated high school at the age of 15. However his intelligence seemed to plague him at times. While studying biochemistry he became distracted by the limitations in science which lead to failing classes and ultimate expulsion from the University of Minnesota. He then joined the army an went to Korea for the war. It was there that he found an interest in Buddisim. After the war, Pirsig returned to education, gaining a degree in Eastern Philosophy and also studying eastern culture and journalism. He later became a teacher of creative writing. However he was still not at piece. His intelligence and search for meaning, a search for quality, left him to be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression, which he was treated for with electroconvulsive therapy, a therapy that is expressed as the turning point in his life in the novel.

To him the therapy changed him; it left him as a different person, somehow separated from who he was in the past. In the novel he expresses his life before the thearapy as a sort of previous life and his life after as an attempt to come to terms with it and reconnect with his son. It was in this time period of his life that he wrote the novel that he became so well known for. It is evident by the similarities between Pirsig and Phadreus that this novel was an attempt to come to terms with his treatment and all that had occurred. He makes it clear from the novel that it was his intelligence that caused the majority of his problems. Pirsig’s intelligence forced him to consider questions that could not be answered. His intelligence also made him terribly frustrated and unnerved by not being able to answer theses questions. There were questions that he could not answer and the novel is the story of his coming to terms with that fact.