Sigmund Freud believed that dreams
were the “gateway to the unconscious”; if this were to be true, the analysis of
the narrator’s disturbing, reoccurring dreams is crucial for understanding the
struggle between him and Phaedrus. Often throughout the second and third parts
of the novel, the narrator experiences frequent nightmares where he is trying to
reach his family, but there is something in the way, and each time he has the
nightmare, more is revealed about its significance. At first, the reason for
his entrapment is very vague; he does not understand why his family cannot hear
him, despite his attempts to contact them. It is frustrating for the narrator,
and every time he has the same nightmare, he comments on his mental slippage,
and how Phaedrus is becoming closer from breaking free.
The
only people in the dream are his wife and his son, Chris. When he sees them,
they are excited yet visibly upset by seeing him. While his wife maintains this
state of melancholy in his dreams, his son is the most dynamic, to the point
where he actually speaks in the dreams. He attempts to contact his father, and
despite his attempts, becomes frustrated with the fact that the narrator is not
breaking through whatever partition is keeping them from each other, and begins
to give up on the narrator, which upsets him greatly when he wakes up and
analyzes his dream. This is representative of Chris’s attachment to the consciousness
that was Phaedrus, but has ceased to be; this is even more critical of
understanding the narrator, because his subconscious understands Chris’s true
love for his old self, which causes a great deal of mental friction and
discomfort for the narrator.
Towards the end of the novel, when
the nightmare takes on full fruition, the true identity of his entrapment is
revealed: he is in the hospital, behind glass. This is best interpreted as his
imprisonment by his own conscious; the narrator’s family is constantly trying
to reach him, and they seem sad because they cannot, and this can be described
as their attempts to reach the old consciousness of the narrator- Phaedrus. The
hospital was the last place where the family was united with Phaedrus, before
he disappeared into the subconscious of the narrator, making it an appropriate
setting for the dream. Later on, the glass transforms from a glass hospital
door to the glass door of a coffin, which is even more vital to interpret;
Phaedrus is dead, lost and buried somewhere within the narrator’s subconscious,
and Chris and his wife are constantly mourning this loss. When the narrator has
his final “breakthrough nightmare”, he literally breaks through the glass
partition, and when he wakes up, he is Phaedrus once again.
An important metaphor found in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
is the mountain he climbed during the road trip. This is the only part of the
novel where the narrator spends a great deal of time off his motorcycle, which
is a negative thing, because the motorcycle is where he is Zen enough to keep
Phaedrus at bay. The narrator takes a hiking journey with his son, Chris, up
the mountain, eager to reach its peak. Despite the struggles he faces with
Chris, they actually make it very far up the mountain- but not to the top of
it. As the narrator climbs higher, he becomes less lucid and feels Phaedrus
teetering between consciousness and sub consciousness, and this is
uncomfortable for him. He decides not to reach the top of the mountain, and
chooses to descend with Chris back to ground level, for he is afraid of what
may happen to him mentally should he reach the top.
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