He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty (Cheever 445).

Cheever is certainly not telling the reader what it means to be an individual human being, but he is telling us what it means to go mad as a result of being an inauthentic human being. Neddy is a man who has lived a self-centered life, doing what he wanted to do, perhaps simply pursuing the superficial materialistic goals society has instilled in him. In any case, he apparently has no idea what others truly think of him, or what they are feeling. He has paid the price of his sanity, at the very least, for his superficial and selfish life.

Lewis Thomas in his protest against the cloning of human beings also has more to say about what is not authentic human reality than what is:

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along

Here we find a similarity between Pirsig and Cheever and Thomas. As we have seen, Cheever's story is a warning against trying to live according to the deceptive standards of the materialistic American Dream. Thomas argues against the idea of cloning human beings because it would eliminate the "mutations" which make individual human beings individual human beings. And Pirsig discovers that one of the major reasons that his students are so often paralyzed and have "nothing to say" about themselves or their world is that they are trying to be like somebody else rather than their individual selves:

She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard. . . . She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself . . . without primary regard for what had been said before. . . . He concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion (Pirsig 416).

The three pieces give this reader the sense that whatever the key to human happiness, originality and freedom might be, it is up to the individual to find and turn that key.

In both works, then, Cheever and Thomas deal with the issue of what makes a human being a human being, what values give him or her a purpose in or connection with life in general and his or her own individual existence. Cheever shows us a man who has come to the end of his rope because he is no longer able to keep up the lies of which his life was mad