FICTIONAL FIGURE
Chris Pirsig
Robert Pirsig's eleven-year-old son who rode on the back of the motorcycle across America — confused, frightened, estranged from his father, murdered in 1979 at age twenty-two outside the San Francisco Zen Center.
Chris Pirsig is the silent presence that gives
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance its emotional
weight. He is eleven years old during the trip, riding on the back of his father's Honda Super Hawk for six weeks and six thousand miles, present for the journey but unable to understand the philosophical Chautauqua unfolding around him. He is frightened of his father's intensity. He does not want to be on the trip. He asks repeatedly when they will arrive, when they can go home, why they are doing this. His questions are the questions of a child who wants stability, predictability, the assurance that the adult in charge knows what he is doing. Pirsig cannot provide those assurances, because Pirsig himself does not know what he is doing — not in the ordinary parental sense. He is trying to reconnect with a son he barely knows, while simultaneously trying to understand the insights of a previous personality (Phaedrus) that nearly