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Chapter 20
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Quality
Identity
Rationality and Irrationality
Duality
Zen
Summary
Analysis
As he and Chris descend the mountain, the narrator muses that he cannot evaluate how truthful it is that the Tao and Phaedrus’s Quality are one and the same. What Phaedrus’s philosophizing really accomplished, however, is an expansion of reason: reason can now encompass thoughts that would have seemed irrational before.
The narrator’s point here is an important one: Quality is not a religious concept. Rather, much like Kant’s or Copernicus’s revelations, it is simply a means of expanding the scope of reason. It only seems irrational because reason hasn’t yet been able to assimilate it into its corpus.
Themes
Chris and the narrator complete their descent and arrive in Bozeman at night. Exhausted, they check into Bozeman’s main hotel so as not to disturb the DeWeeses.
The duo’s departure from the mountain signifies the end of this particular story of Phaedrus’s groundbreaking realizations about Quality.
Themes
