Zarathustra, the Prophet of the Übermensch, and the Death-of-God Theme

Abstract

Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the 1880s at the height of his powers. Each of the first three of the book’s four parts he dashed off in about ten days.1 It is a major work, at once an epic-like account of the moral trials that Zarathustra must endure and a collection of Zarathustra’s prophetic speeches. In the manner of an allegory, it also contains Zarathustra’s encounters with various other quasi-mythical symbolic figures. These other opposing figures — the saint, the soothsayer, the dwarf, who is the spirit of gravity, and others, including the various higher men — speak in dialogue with Zarathustra. In this way there is in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, though on a smaller scale, something like the polyphony that we find in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous corpus between his pseudonymous authors.