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 walks deeper into the forest, lost in thought, and accidentally steps on a man, who angrily curses him. Zarathustra asks the man’s forgiveness and offers him a parable—a story of a wanderer stumbling over a dog and then getting into a fight with the animal. When the man sits up, Zarathustra is horrified to sees that the man’s arm is bleeding. He introduces himself and invites the man to his cave to heal. The man has been searching for Zarathustra, so he’s overjoyed. He has been lying here, his bleeding arm being bitten by leeches; now, the “leech of conscience” has found him.
The bleeding man is a scientific specialist, focused on one narrow area of knowledge. He is pursuing this knowledge on Zarathustra’s turf of philosophy (science being considered a subspecialty of philosophy) and has studied so rigorously that he has injured himself. He, too, is a kind of higher individual. He could be a symbol of biologist Charles Darwin, whose ideas (particularly the theory of evolution) Nietzsche knew and drew upon in his writings.
Themes
The man explains that he is the “conscientious man of the spirit.” He says that he is an expert on the brain of the leech, something he has studied for a long time. He has sought to know just this one thing and to do so with strict honesty. Zarathustra’s teaching has now seduced him. Zarathustra says that the blood pouring down the man’s arm is evidence of this. The scientist heads to Zarathustra’s cave, and Zarathustra, hearing another cry, continues his search.
Zarathustra respects the man’s single-minded, honest search for knowledge and wishes to save him—like the prophet and the kings, the scientist belongs to the class of higher men.
Themes
