Abstract

The task of this dissertation is to work out the precise relation between the theoretical developments in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and its poetic or narrative structure. I begin with an interpretation of what the book takes as its own goal, namely, redemption from revenge. After a brief introduction, the second chapter distinguishes redemption from freedom or liberation, arguing that in Nietzsche's text redemption signifies the final stage of the self-overcoming of the will to freedom. Chapter 3 completes the preliminary study by laying bare the temporal and poetic dimensions of redemption by tracing Nietzsche's understanding of the redemptive role of art from its early determination in The Birth of Tragedy through its restriction to poetry and connection with time in Nietzsche's writings from the mid-1880's. ;Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the incorporation of the concern for truthfulness into Zarathustra's discourse. I recall Nietzsche's discussion in The Birth of Tragedy of the death of Attic tragedy at the hands of the Socratic demand for truthfulness, and I argue that this opposition between art and truth is reinstated and eventually surpassed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Chapter 5 contains my central interpretive claim: that the eternal return functions primarily to provide the condition for the possibility of true poetry. I argue that the eternal return is a phenomenological description of the experience of joy, an experience that transforms the past in such a way that it would conform with the demands of poetic representation. ;The dissertation culminates in Chapter 6 with the demonstration of how the theoretical developments exposed in the preceding chapters lead to a collapse in the relationship between the book's narrator and its hero. I study the progression of this relationship and show how its collapse is marked by the omission of the words "Thus spoke Zarathustra" from the end of Part Three. I then conclude with an indication of how the results of this study could be mobilized for a reading of Nietzsche's later writings