Nietzsche’s Philosophical and Narrative Styles

Beginning with Nietzsche’s views on literary style and philosophical language, the present work charts not only the diverse phases in his output, but also the widely diverse critical assessments they engendered. With Also sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche gave himself over freely to his renewed will to fiction, producing the most sustained narrative within his body of works. A close reading of Zarathustra reveals it to possess numerous strategies in common with narrative traditions up to and including the nineteenth century, while still retaining its unique character as a parody of the Bible. The interplay between its often ignored third-person narrator and the prophet’s Reden provides some textual answers to the thorny problems of the eternal return and the will to power. Finally, Zarathustra proves itself to be a means for reexamining critical positions on the function of mimesis and diegesis in narratives in general.