Robert M. Pirsig · 1974 · road

Pirsig's 1974 account of a seventeen-day motorcycle trip from Minnesota to the California coast with his eleven-year-old son, and of the philosophical inquiry running alongside it - and of Phaedrus, the man he was before the hospital, catching up with him somewhere in Montana.

1. 1
   Minneapolis

   July 1968, and a father and his eleven-year-old son leave on a Honda Superhawk with John and Sylvia Sutherland - and the narrator has already begun the Chautauqua that runs alongside the road for the whole book.

2. 2
   Oakes

   Night one, in North Dakota - two hundred and sixty miles on the first day, on back roads chosen because they have no towns on them, which is a long way for two people on a heavily packed small motorcycle.

3. 3
   Shadehill

   Night two, camping by the reservoir near Lemmon in South Dakota - and the first of the ghosts: Phaedrus, the man the narrator used to be before the electroconvulsive therapy.

4. 4
   Miles City

   Night three, and the Sutherlands are still with them - and the Chautauqua turns to the split between classical and romantic understanding, which is the argument the whole book is arranged around.

5. 5
   Laurel

   Night four, in the Yellowstone valley - the Sutherlands turn back for Bozeman and the two of them go on alone, which is where the book stops being about four people and starts being about two.

6. 6
   Beartooth Pass

   Eleven thousand feet over the Absaroka on a loaded motorcycle, and one of the great riding roads in America - the point at which the physical journey briefly outweighs everything going on in the narrator's head.

7. 7
   Gardiner

   Night five, at the north gate of Yellowstone - and the descent out of the high country toward the town where Phaedrus taught, which the narrator has been circling for a hundred pages.

8. 8
   Bozeman

   Night six and a short stay: the college where Phaedrus taught rhetoric and pursued the idea of Quality until it destroyed him - and the narrator walks the same corridors as a stranger, and Chris asks questions he cannot answer.

9. 9
   Lolo Pass

   Night seven, a wild camp at the foot of the pass - and then over the Bitterroots on the road Lewis and Clark took, into the mountains where the narrative and the Chautauqua start to converge.

10. 10
    Whitebird Pass

    The switchbacks down into the Salmon River country in Idaho - Phaedrus coming back now, and the boy sensing it before the father will admit it to himself.

11. 11
    Brownlee

    Night eight, camping on the Oregon side of Hells Canyon - and the heat coming up, which Pirsig writes about the way he writes about everything, as a maintenance problem with a philosophical dimension.

12. 12
    Baker City

    Eastern Oregon on the old Oregon Trail ground - one of the long days that make the trip read, from a distance, like a much easier journey than it actually was.

13. 13
    Bend

    Night nine, a wild camp in the high desert - and by now the narrator is losing the argument he has been having with himself since Minnesota about who Phaedrus was and whether he is coming back.

14. 14
    Crater Lake

    The caldera, and one of the few places Pirsig lets the scenery simply be there - a blue that stops the Chautauqua for a page, which is as close as this book comes to a rest.

15. 15
    Grants Pass

    Night eleven, in southern Oregon and nearly at the coast - and the passage where Chris starts asking directly what is wrong with his father, and gets nothing back.

16. 16
    Crescent City

    The California line and the Pacific, and cold fog after weeks of heat - the redwood coast, and the last two hundred miles of a journey the narrator has been dreading the end of.

17. 17
    Redcrest

    Night twelve, among the redwoods on the Avenue of the Giants - the tall dark country before the road comes back out to the sea.

18. 18
    Caspar

    The Mendocino coast, where the novel effectively ends: Chris in tears on a cliff above the Pacific, and the narrator finally telling him the truth about who he was and what was done to him in the hospital.

19. 19
    San Francisco

    The last pages, riding south with the helmet off and the boy standing on the pegs behind him - the father telling the son that things are going to get better now, and the reader left to decide.