A Reflection on Robert Pirsig’s essay excerpt of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Recently, we’ve read an excerpt of Robert Pirsig’s essay Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The excerpt topic is ‘stuckness’.

I liked this essay after some decryption of what the essay was trying to say. I thought that it was interesting how Pirsig calls this topic ‘stuckness’ instead of something else. After reading this excerpt, I thought that Pirsig was trying to go a complicated way of saying “think out of the box”. His arguments make sense, if not the confusing wording (at least for a sophomore student). His example of the screw in the motorcycle was actually sort of funny because of what he records as the general human train of thought—it makes sense in a common sort of way. I also like his word choice in how he tries to emphasize his meaning; “You’re stuck. Terminated. It’s absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle. …. This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput.” (Pirsig, chapter 24) Another thing I thought that was interesting was how Pirsig uses made up words to try to help explain his point. For example, he uses the word “commonest” to emphasize how a broken motorcycle (in an analogy view), or (in the essay idea flow) getting mentally stuck is not something you see a lot. Maybe it could be another way to help explain the idea/notion to think out of the box. I also liked his ‘parts of a train’ examples (Classic vs. Romantic). When I first read this, I didn’t understand where the names of Classic vs. Romantic came from. But as we did a Harkness discussion in class, I threw out the possibility that it could be the parallel to the music eras in history. My teacher, Mr. Schauble, liked that thought and organized a lot of the ideas under those two categories. So I thought that was cool.