Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintaintenance

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to mean the same thing. Phaedrus wasn’t insane; he just had ideas that were different and told everyone about them even if they thought he was crazy. Phaedrus said what he felt and wasn’t afraid of what other people thought because he stuck to what he believed in. his ideas were similar to the ideas of Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton but people could not understand what Phaedrus was “preaching.” His theories were so far out there that people could not understand them and that is why he was assumed to be crazy. He was known as this because we are afraid of change so society was afraid of Phaedrus’ ideas that were crazy and different. This is what was evident in the end of the book. Phaedrus wasn’t crazier than any of us are; he just had some different ideas. Others couldn’t understand his philosophies, which is what led him to eventually believe he was insane. Phaedrus was actually completely reliable; it was those around him that were not.

The story leads us to believe that Phaedrus was the crazy one, while the narrator was supposedly a completely different person. The truth is actually that it was not Phaedrus who was crazy, but the narrator. The narrator was completely unpredictable and unreliable and at times he seemed perfectly sane and normal, but would have random episodes where he just became absolutely obsessed with what and who Phaedrus was. He became consumed with it and believed things that were false. His body had been altered to basically depend on Phaedrus, which is what led to his unreliability. But Phaedrus was a normal person who happened to have some amazing ideas that were “different” which made him very reliable.