role of self‐assured prophet, he must now acknowledge the graves of his past that impede his way to the goal of affirmation of life as it is.
In the closing section of Part Two, entitled “The Stillest Hour,” Zarathustra relates how a night time voice whispers to him to confront what he already knows. In prior sections, he had revealed greater vulnerability and signs of emotional turmoil. But he had not garnered the strength or courage to excavate the deeper meanings of his moods.
PART THREE
Part Three opens with Zarathustra's ascending a treacherous mountain path (“The Wanderer”). He is ready to scale his “ultimate peak.”
THE VISION AND THE ENIGMA
In this section, Nietzsche first hints at his famous notion of the eternal return. Voyaging on a ship, he relates a story to sailors onboard. It is in the form of a riddle, and Zarathustra suggests that the sailors are in the best position to guess its meaning.
In his parable, Zarathustra strides through a gloomy landscape in defiance of the spirit of gravity. He discovers a dwarf straddling his shoulders. The dwarf jumps off, and Zarathustra confronts him with an elaborate cosmology concerning the nature of time. This enigmatic, cyclical model seems to have features of an eternal return but before he can finish explaining it, Zarathustra is interrupted by a howling dog and notices the dwarf has vanished.
He suddenly catches sight of a reclining shepherd, who has a black snake lodged in his throat. He calls on the shepherd to rip it out, and he bites off its head and spits it out. The shepherd then stands up like a transformed being and laughs. That concludes Zarathustra's enigmatic riddle. It leaves the eternal return tantalizingly vague.
THE CONVALESCENT
In “The Convalescent,” Zarathustra presents the fullest (and only) articulation of his enigmatic concept, the eternal return. It is tempting to think that the first iteration presented within the riddle was its true expression. But Zarathustra was not yet in the position to call it forth. His encounter with the writhing shepherd was both a vision and a premonition – a premonition of his own future confrontation with the thought.
In “The Convalescent,” Zarathustra sees himself ready to face his greatest thought – “Up, abysmal thought, out of my depth!” The process of extracting the thought from his innermost being is so grueling and exhausting that he must recuperate for seven days. Only after he has recovered can he give voice to the experience.
Zarathustra attempts to convey his personal encounter with the thought of the eternal return. This time it is not a description of a concrete reality outside himself but the articulation of his subjective feelings (a thought) toward an inner experience.
He conveys the thought that all signs of past greatness reveal a root pettiness, and that even the greatest are but small on closer inspection and will eternally return as small. Everything great fails to withstand closer scrutiny. Humankind does not progress or improve, but forever repeats the same pattern and produces the same types.
If the small eternally return and the great can no longer inspire, and if even past greatness conceals recurring human weakness, pettiness, and resentment, then that knowledge will cripple and suffocate. But by confronting the awareness and ripping it out, Zarathustra can move beyond it and incorporate it into his overall life affirmation.
It was latent disgust with life – specifically, his own life – that first inspired his ideal of a higher human type. But now his deeper insights into man have forced him to reconcile with life as it is and will always be.
THE SECOND DANCE SONG
In the penultimate section of Part Three, “The Second Dance Song,” Nietzsche again encounters the wily temptress, Life. Having internalized the thought of the eternal return, he has overcome the spirit of gravity that weighed him down. He can approach Life with greater confidence, and he now engages with her in a playful, bantering exchange. It is an exchange of equals, and wily Life chastises him for his brash attempt at mastery over her. She even envies his wisdom and fears he might leave her.
At the end of their encounter, Zarathustra accepts the boundaries that Life has drawn for them – a love that respects each other's freedom and independence – and affirms his relationship with her.
Nietzsche thus completes the main arc of his philosophical drama.
It started with an ambitious search to solve modern man's malaise. It concludes on a quiet, personal note. His protagonist Zarathustra has set aside his wisdom and learns to honor the mystery and inscrutability of life – and to find (temporary) joy and fulfillment in its sublime, transitory moments.
PART FOUR
There has been much scholarly speculation as to why Nietzsche appended a “fourth and final part” to Zarathustra.
He originally planned to conclude the text with Part Three, but decided to have Part Four published privately. He had difficulty finding a publisher for it, but might also have considered the material too raucous, almost blasphemous, and therefore decided to limit its audience to friends.
Commentators have also expressed ambivalence about its literary qualities. Whereas the first three parts are composed in an elevated, lofty style, the tone of Part Four is farcical, even slapstick. A likely model for it may have been the comic satyr play that followed the performance of a trilogy of Greek tragedies.
At the start of Part Four, a now aged Zarathustra encounters an assortment of “higher men” on his wanderings, including two kings, an old magician, and the pope, among others. Nietzsche even introduces an ass, which the figures end up worshipping. They take its braying to be a form of affirmation of the eternal return. Here Nietzsche parodies his greatest thought. He seems to want to warn against those who would turn his thought into a set doctrine or the basis for a substitute religion.
ZARATHUSTRA AND THE OVERCOMING OF PITY
Nietzsche offers textual evidence for his motivation for composing Part Four.
First among these are Zarathustra's opening passage to Part Four, his words in the second section “The Cry of Distress” as well as his concluding remarks in the final section (“The Sign”). He says: “O you higher men, your distress was it that the old soothsayer foretold to me yestermorn. Unto your distress did he want to seduce and tempt me.” He had also played with the idea of subtitling Part Four “The Temptation of Zarathustra,” which hints at the Soothsayer's attempt to seduce Zarathustra by evoking his pity.
Zarathustra indicates that overcoming pity of “higher types” is his ultimate challenge, his real proof of strength. By appealing to his innate pity for them, the soothsayer hoped to lure Zarathustra away from his Dionysian isolation and to throw him back into despair.
In the work's final section, “The Sign,” Zarathustra slips out of his cave in the early morning. His lion joins him. The lion roars and the remaining cast of characters scamper off. Zarathustra interprets this as a sign that his time has come. He recognizes that the cry of distress had been the soothsayer's trick