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Of Old and Young Women
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 day, while Zarathustra is sleeping, an adder comes along and bites his neck. When the snake is about to leave, Zarathustra thanks it—it woke him up at just the right time. The adder warns him that its poison is deadly, but Zarathustra smiles and says that a snake’s venom can’t kill a dragon, and that the snake should take back its poison. The snake obliges, licking the poison from Zarathustra’s wound.
This story illustrates Nietzsche’s ongoing challenge to conventional morality. Zarathustra’s insistence that the snake lick his wound is meant as a challenge to the Christian teaching on “turning the other cheek,” or returning evil with goodness. Zarathustra also interprets the wound as something that benefits him instead of harming him, since it wakes him up from complacency. With this, Zarathustra hints that people shouldn’t ignore or resent their suffering—rather, they should confront it head-on and conceptualize it in a nuanced way.
Themes
When Zarathustra told this story to his followers, he explained its moral. The “good and just” accuse Zarathustra of destroying morals, but Zarathustra says that one must not repay one’s enemy with good for evil—that would make the enemy ashamed. Instead, he should prove that his enemy has done him good. It’s better to be angry and to curse back than to shame one’s enemy. Zarathustra says that revenge is more “human” than no revenge.
Zarathustra sees himself not primarily as a destroyer of morals but as a creator of new ones. Zarathustra teaches that shaming an enemy or withholding vengeance are bad because such actions fall short of asserting one’s will to power.
Themes
