Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Rethinking Morality
The Superman and the Will to Power
Death of God and Christianity
Eternal Recurrence
Summary
Analysis
Zarathustra tells one of his disciples that he knows the body so well that the spirit within him is only figurative, and everything that’s permanent is only an “image.”
This section, especially the discussion of the transitory as image, mimics Goethe’s Faust Part Two, the “Mystic Chorus.” Zarathustra means that his body and spirit are perfectly united, and that anything “unchangeable” in the world is an illusion.
Themes
Zarathustra tells one of his disciples that the poets—including himself—lie too much and know too little. They convince themselves that because of their tender feelings, they have a special connection to nature. They also create false ides about gods and supermen, and Zarathustra wearies of these supposed realities. Zarathustra reflects for a while and says that he is tired of all poets, who only pretend to be deep. They give birth to guilty, repentant people.
Nietzsche includes himself among those he is mocking in this section. He makes fun of poets for projecting their own sentimental ideas upon nature, faking profundity. In fact, such profundity is really self-absorbed and excessively solemn—traits that Nietzsche finds inconsistent with the will to power.
Themes
