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
One morning in his cave, Zarathustra springs out of bed, shouting like a “madman.” His animals flee in terror. Zarathustra summons everyone to awaken—but then, under the weight of a staggering thought, he collapses as if dead. When he revives, he lies in bed, pale and trembling. His eagle brings him food. At last, he stirs, and Zarathustra’s animals tell him that the “wheel of existence” turns unceasingly. Zarathustra smiles ruefully at them; his animals already understand the redemption that it has taken him all this time to realize. Humanity is cruel to itself, burdening life with sin, cross-bearing, and penitence. But Zarathustra has learned that humanity’s wickedness is its greatest strength. Yet he is disgusted that man’s best is yet so small. Even the “little man” recurs eternally, which grieves Zarathustra.
Zarathustra considers the paradoxical strength of what conventional morality sees as wickedness. If good and bad are purely relative, as Nietzsche taught, then repressing “wickedness” might be stifling what is actually best about humanity. The “wicked” person’s boldness, courage, and self-determination, in other words, are mistaken for evil—when really, they’re the traits that enable a person to work toward humanity’s long-term betterment. In light of the Eternal Recurrence, ordinary humanity’s feebleness is depressing to Zarathustra.
Themes
Zarathustra’s animals urge him to go out into to the world now—he should sing new songs for humanity, accompanying himself with a “new lyre.” It is his destiny to be “the teacher of the eternal recurrence.” All things have already existed an infinite number of times—for Zarathustra, this is not a fearful truth, but a happy one.
Zarathustra’s animals remind him that he teaches that his recurrence is not to a new or better life, but to the same life. He teaches the great noontide and the Superman. And now, it’s time for Zarathustra’s down-going. His animals fall silent, and Zarathustra silently communes with his soul.
The Eternal Recurrence must be distinguished from belief in an afterlife. It’s not an escape from this life but an infinite recurrence of the very same—which can only be embraced when one fully accepts and embraces life as it is.
Themes
