“Felt sorry for Chris, his son in the book. Totally empathised with him when he sighed 'Dad..I'm bored!'. what does Dad do? Sends him home alone! An utterly self-absorbed father takes him out on a month-long motorbike trip expounding academic rhetoric to anyone who will listen. If I was as obssessed with theory as he was it would drive me up the wall. All in all, interesting, in a preachy kind of way but really felt sorry for the kid. Not a fun trip.”
“How the fictional Pirsig failed to interact with his son, the fictional Chris is an important theme of the book - how Pirsig was not a whole person and he was struggling to become unified. As the poem he referred to in the story and then at the end - Chris was carrying Pirsig and not the other way around - metaphorically speaking. Everything in the book was carefully crafted to blend the fictional/descriptive elements to match the intellectual/Rational elements metaphorically.The book is not a story of a real motorcycle trip but a fictional telling as the means to illustrate his philosophy.”
“I absolutely agree with grayraven -- Chris has very important symbolic value. His presence and this conflict tells us that, although Pirsig was a great philosopher and could tell people how to live and how to feel the Quality, he couldn't manage his own life well; he couldn't pay enough attention to his son as he was always occupied with all those philosophical thoughts and his Chautauqua. It's like he was thinking of advanced concepts and the meaning of life whereas he had much more significant and ephemeral problems right besides him. The book points us that the first problems we need to solve are the ones that seem less significant, the ones that are closer, because they may evolve and have a huge impact on us.”
