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Of Reading and Writing
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 notices that a young man is avoiding him; one evening, he finds the young man on a mountainside. He grasps a nearby tree and tells the young man that he couldn’t shake this tree if he tried, yet the wind invisibly bends it. Similarly, invisible things torment us the most.
Zarathustra talks with a young man about the nature of upward striving toward the Superman. In this chapter, he emphasizes the individual nature of such striving; obstacles to attaining the Superman ideal are primarily internal rather than external.
Themes
The more a person wants to rise to the heights, Zarathustra tells the young man, the more his “roots” plunge earthward, into evil. The young man agrees: the higher he climbs, the more he despises his climbing, and the lonelier he is. Zarathustra says that when a tree grows high, it finds no companions to whom it can relate. It seems to wait for a lightning strike.
Zarathustra further explains that progressing toward the Superman is an individual and therefore lonely pursuit. One’s earthbound roots tend to entangle a person, and a seeker becomes misunderstood and friendless as he pursues a higher version of themselves.
Themes
The young man agrees again; he thinks that Zarathustra is that “lightning” for which he has been waiting, to destroy him. He begins to weep as he and Zarathustra walk together. Zarathustra comforts the young man, urging him not to give up. He draws a distinction between the noble man (who wants to create a new virtue) and the good man (who wants to preserve the old). The risk for the noble man is not that he might become a good man, but that he might become a destroyer, without a goal. Such people become “sensualists” instead of heroes.
Zarathustra explains the risk of the lonely striving for the Superman: if a noble man, desiring to create a new virtue, isn’t focused on a goal, he can go astray. Instead of heroically creating a new virtue, then he might simply destroy the old one in a kind of aimless indulgence.
Themes
