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arrows : that is Persian virtue. – Have I been understood? The self-overcoming of morality through truthfulness, the self-overcoming of the moralist into his opposite – into me – that is what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth. (Em Homo) .
    The book is very loosely constructed, but it does possess direction and a plot of sorts.
    PART ONE. Prologue , (1) Zarathustra comes down out of solitude, announces (2) that God is dead and (3) preaches God’s successor, the Superman. Mankind fails to understand him, even when he (4) expounds his beatitudes (cf. Matthew 5, 3–11) and (5) appeals to their pride by describing the Superman’s antithesis, the ‘Ultimate Man’, the man who sacrifices the future to his own present. The (6) overtoppling of the tightrope walker (mankind balanced over an abyss) by the buffoon (Zarathustra himself perhaps, an unannounced attraction) brings home to Zarathustra (7) that human existence is ‘uncanny’ (cf. the second chorus of Antigone : ‘Many things are uncanny, but none more uncanny than man’), and after a bad night (8) he resolves (9) to desert the market place and speak his message only to the individual.
    The twenty-two ‘discourses’ which follow are addressed by Zarathustra to his band of disciples. Five of the discourses are enclosed in a miniature dramatic scene, the remainder are direct address. Each is an epitome of Nietzsche’s views on the subject in question:
    1: the ‘education of the spirit’: self-discipline, independence, creativity (for another account, in quite different language, see Human, All Too Human , Preface to volume I (1886), sections 3–7); 2: ‘negative virtue’, virtue which consists in not doing wrong and which has as its reward ‘peace of soul’; 3: ‘the metaphysical world’ (including a renunciation of his earlier view ( The Birth of Tragedy , 1872) that aesthetic values are the only true values); 4: the relation between mind and body (a prologue to the theory of the will to power); 5: the nature of virtue; 6: its opposite, the ‘criminal instinct’; 7: aphorisms on authorship, happiness and laughter (introduces ‘the Spirit of Gravity’); 8: ‘nobility of soul’; 9: pessimism; 10: ‘Live dangerously!’; II: the State; 12: nausea at mankind, ‘l’ enfer, c’est les autres’; 13: sensuality and its disguises; 14: how to be a true friend; 15: the relativity of moral values (introduces the will to power); 16: critique of ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’; 17: the need for solitude and the danger of solitude; 18: the nature of women; 19: the nature of justice; 20: bad marriages and good ones; 21: bad deaths and good ones.
    Over all these discourses hovers Zarathustra’s dictum ‘Man is something that must be overcome.’ The final chapter reverts to the Prologue, to the death of God and the need for the Superman to give significance to the earth; Zarathustra extols the magnanimous man, the man so full of strength and well-being he bestows gifts on others because he has to, and exhorts his disciples to independence. Then he leaves them.
    PART TWO. Much more various than Part One. Zarathustra is more of a dramatic character and eight of the twenty-two chapters involve action.
    1: corresponds to the Prologue of Part One: Zarathustra’s return; 2: a much-expanded recapitulation of the ‘God is dead’ theme, and the reintroduction of the Superman as God’s successor; 3: pity for mankind and the need to overcome it; 4: organized religion and the priesthood; 5: another essay on virtue, true and false; 6: another essay on nausea atmankind and how to avoid it; 7: another essay on justice and a polemic against revengefulness disguised as justice; 8: philosophy, true and false; 9–11: prose poems, autobiographical, for the most part fretful, plaintive, disgruntled (cf. Part Three 3–4 and 14–16); 12: the will to power in full; 13: resumes and completes 8; 14: critique of contemporary culture; 16: critique of the contemplative