Encyclopedia of Philosophy: THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA - Nietzsche

Nietzsche regarded Thus Spoke Zarathustra as his most important achievement. The work’s subtitle, ‘A Book for Everyone and No one’, conveys its mixture of accessibility and inaccessibility. In style, it is most obviously modelled on the Bible; and Nietzsche may have gained a hint of the possibilities of Biblical pastiche from Mark Twain’s satirical description of the Mormon scriptures. Although the name ‘Zarathustra’ is borrowed from the ancient Iranian figure, there is no particular relation between Nietzsche’s protagonist and the historical Zarathustra. Rather, Nietzsche has chosen a format which allows a dramatic and poetic presentation of ideas which could hardly be expressed in a more conventional manner. Although he had been preparing and making notes for the composition for some time, the actual writing of each instalment was done in a few weeks. This may account for the spontaneity of many passages, but it cannot be denied that the level is uneven. Zarathustra is forceful, poetic, thoughtful and satirical; he can also be rambling and querulous or, worse still, as sentimental as his all-too-legitimate descendant, Kahlil Gibran’s best-selling ‘Prophet’. Especially in Part Three, the careful organization of Nietzsche’s earlier books is lacking; and the turn to a kind of satirical burlesque in Part Four, while it has some admirers, is seen by most (including, perhaps, its author) as failing to achieve its intentions. Martin Heidegger advised that we ought to read Thus Spoke Zarathustra just as rigorously as we read a work of Aristotle—though he added that this does not mean in precisely the same way ([7.40], 70). There is much in this, even though, knowing something of Nietzsche’s personal life, we recognize various allusions in the text.