Quality Control: Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

Everyone has a desire, something that they want to achieve or obtain for them. Whether it is ethical or immoral, having desires is almost inevitable. Sometimes these desires make people go through tough times. Tragic occurrences such as death and broken relationships shape the lives of people positively or negatively. In the following essay, “Many Rivers to Cross” and the short stories, “Two Kinds” and “Everyday Use”, the protagonists of these texts struggle to achieve their desire, but because of those struggles the main characters do eventually come to a revelation.

Richard’s thoughts outside the beach are immediately hindered by an illusion of paradise from the beach, which Richard does not fully recognize until the true reality begins to emerge near the end of his stay. When Richard finds the beach, he is fascinated by how nobody in the community ever talks about their past lives before the beach. The people from the beach remain at the beach because they do not want to confront the reality that they have left behind, so there is no surprise to readers that the community does not like to talk about the outside world. Richard realizes that nobody in the community cares about what he has to say about the outside word and the problems he encountered there, because that is not their world anymore – their world is the beach, which Richard fully recognizes when he comes back from the rice run: “No one was even slightly interested [about the rice run]. A few asked, ‘How was it?’ … but as soon as I began to answer … their attention became diverted by something” (190). At

“The Swimmer,” a short fiction by John Cheever, presents a theme to the reader about the unavoidable changes of life. The story focuses on the round character by the name of Neddy Merrill who is in extreme denial about the reality of his life. He has lost his youth, wealth, and family yet only at the end of the story does he develop the most by experiencing a glimpse of realization on all that he has indeed lost. In the short story “The Swimmer,” John Cheever uses point of view, setting and symbolism to show the value of true relationships and the moments of life that are taken for granted.

Today’s consumers are constantly trying to judge the quality of products. But what is quality? How and by whom is quality determined? Some would say the designer creates specifications, which in turn dictate the quality of a product. That quality is also based on the acceptable value of a part within a whole product.

The tide was coming in and there was only a narrow strip of firm beach between the water and the white, stumbling stuff near the palm terrace. Ralph chose the firm strip as a path because he needed to think, and only here could he allow his feet to move without having to watch them. Suddenly, pacing by the water, he was overcome with astonishment. He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one 's waking life was spent watching one 's feet. He stopped, facing the strip; and remembering that first enthusiastic exploration as though it were part of a brighter childhood, he smiled jeeringly. He turned then and walked back toward the platform with the sun in his face. The time had come for the assembly and as he walked into the concealing splendors of the sunlight he went carefully over the points of his speech. There must be no mistake about this assembly, no chasing imaginary. . . .

The life as a coast guard living in a lighthouse on a desolate coast, seems simple and easy, maybe even taskless, but for a man with a troubled mind, and an incurable fixation, existence seems like an unavoidable entropy. He gazed into the divided scene in front of him, the horizon splitting the

Confronting crises of technological annihilation and personal madness, Robert Pirsig finds each to be a manifestation of a deeper crisis of Reason. In response) he suggests an alternative to our current paradigm of rationality, the "art of motorcycle maintenance." By showing that our understanding and performance derive from our emotional and evaluative commitments, he challenges the cultural commonplace which construes "subjective" states as distortions of "objective" reality. In so doing, he asserts that "wholeness" or sanity may be achieved only through "passionate caring," and an awareness and acceptance of how our emotions and values shape our

There is but one thing that no one can ever have enough of. Admittedly, there are various substitutions that can suffice as satisfactory for one’s happiness. Yet, there is an exception that creeps and remains ubiquitously unseen and incessantly yearned for. As Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, puts it, there are “ships at a distance [that] have every man’s wish on board.” Indeed, these desires ride a boat which sails on, perhaps, the ocean of time. There are those who are fortunate and whose ships “come in with the tide,” relying on the chance that their aspirations come in miraculously from the vast ocean or window of opportunity. There are also those who are unfortunate and whose ships “sail forever on the

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as written by Robert Pirsig, focuses on a number of philosophical life values. These values include quality, identity, duality, and Zen. This paper will focus mainly on the subject of quality and the effect dwelling on its definition had on Pirsig.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - The Reconciliation of Western and Eastern Philosophy

In Robert Pirsig’s semi-autobiographical text Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig shares a real-life experience about a motorcycle journey from Minneapolis to Montana with his son, Chris, and two friends, John and Sylvia. On this trip, they don’t have a precise schedule, but instead they let the uncrowded roads that cars avoid, show them the way. As the bare roads are being traveled upon, the narrator begins to reveal mysterious things about himself, his companions, and his past. The narrator’s actions and memories trigger him to tell lessons and lectures that are more significant than motorcycle maintenance. The relationships the narrator has with each character, especially his son, play a huge role in the suspense of the book and his split personality that is briefly discussed. The rhetorical usage of mixed genres help balance out the text making it

Appreciating life through certain everyday experiences helps provide humans with a sense of the sacred, which is an ongoing theme in both texts and has been lost through recent generations. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig, the narrator Phadreus demonstrates how a classical outlook on life can bring about this type of happiness and let one ultimately gain a feeling that is difficult to attain. The classical view on life is similar to the real experiences John Dewey sorts through in his most famous work, Art as an Experience.

Merriam Webster defines quality as a degree of excellence, or a distinguishing attribute. Managers strive for excellence in the workplace to improve customer satisfaction, increase the output in manufacturing while minimizing defects, as well as making the company more profitable. There are several different management systems or methodologies available for businesses to use, but the Balanced Scorecard and the Malcolm Baldrige Performance Excellence Program is the most common and widely used in the United States.

Quality is defined as conformance to the requirement, not goodness: The first absolute explains that management must strive to ensure that during the quality improvement process everyone is getting things done right the first time. Crosby stated that in other to do this management must state clearly what are the individual roles of the employee, management must also supply the employees with the resources needed to do their task and lastly management must give continuous support and encouragement to the employees during the improvement process. When quality is defined as conformance to requirement it helps to reduce hassle and improve quality at the same time. Crosby (1995).

Quality is never an accident it is always the results of high intention, sincere efforts, intelligent directions and skillful execution, it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.