Corpus · Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Why Does Zarathustra Leave Again?
Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Essential Reading Path · Reading 10 of 10
Read: Part IV, “The Drunken Song,” all twelve sections, then “The Sign” in full. Stop at the end of Zarathustra’s final departure, before the Appendix and Ludovici’s notes. The final exercise also returns to Prologue §1 and one earlier passage.
Allow: About 90–115 minutes, including the passages, this guide, a return to earlier readings, and the final written response.
Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche. Free alternative: The Drunken Song · The Sign (Thomas Common, Thus Spake Zarathustra).
Chapter names follow Common’s edition; see the edition guide for alternate titles. Its Roman numerals I–LXXX number chapters across the book, while the assignment above specifies parts and internal sections. If highlighting fails, locate the stated chapter and section. This guide uses overman where Common writes superman. The introduction and appended notes by other writers are distinct from Nietzsche’s text; the explanations below are this guide’s commentary.
Before you read
In Reading 1, Zarathustra descended from the mountain because his wisdom needed people to receive it. He addressed a crowd that wanted the future he despised. Your first notes asked what might justify his preferred future, and what he still needed to understand about teaching.
By now he has questioned inherited values, asked disciples to leave him, confronted the will's inability to change the past, and struggled with the return of what he finds hardest to endure. The guests in his cave have also begun to recover their attachment to life. Does that mean he has finally found his companions?
Imagine learning something during an unusually moving gathering. You leave grateful to the person who made the experience possible. The next morning, away from that atmosphere, the insight must find a place in what you can actually do. Gratitude, understanding, and the ability to continue are related achievements, but they need not arrive together. This is our example of a question the last two chapters bring into view.
The main question: What has changed in Zarathustra and his listeners, and why does the book end with another departure?
Read both chapters in full. Track who affirms life, who asks whether the teaching has been understood, and what happens when the night of celebration gives way to morning. Keep your response to Reading 1 available for the final exercise.
Three things to notice
- Recovery and dependence. The ugliest man becomes willing to have lived his whole life. How does he connect that change to Zarathustra, and how do the others respond?
- One joy and all suffering. What allows the song to move from wanting a particular moment again to wanting the return of everything? How much does that connection ask us to accept?
- The repeated sunrise. In the final chapter, compare the guests, the animals, and the companions Zarathustra still awaits. What remains unsettled when he leaves?
A way to read the passages
The guests have genuinely recovered something
“The Drunken Song” begins outside the cave. Zarathustra leads the ugliest man by the hand, showing him the moon and the waterfalls. The guests stand together with newly comforted hearts. Zarathustra is pleased by them, but keeps that response private out of respect for their happiness and silence.
Those details matter after the comic worship of Reading 9. The book allows the guests more than a ridiculous failure. The ugliest man says that this day has made him content, for the first time, to have lived his entire life. He can now imagine answering death with a desire to live again.
The narrator then explicitly describes the higher men's transformation and convalescence. They recognize what has happened and turn gratefully toward Zarathustra. A reading that dismissed the whole evening as counterfeit would miss that recognition. Something valuable has become possible for people whose earlier encounters were marked by distress.
Yet the form of their gratitude raises the course's recurring question. The ugliest man attaches his renewed willingness to live to the festival and to Zarathustra's presence. The guests thank, honor, caress, and kiss their teacher's hands. Has life become desirable through an understanding they can sustain, or does its desirability still depend on the person who hosts them?
These possibilities can coexist. Someone may experience a real change while still needing the circumstances that first made it possible. The morning will test what kind of companions these recovering guests can be.
Intoxication changes the form of the teaching
Zarathustra himself becomes unsteady. The narrator presents him as if drunk, then wonders what thoughts could be passing through him. This is not a report granting us complete access to his mind. The account moves through appearances and suggestions before he responds to the midnight bell.
The chapter's title should therefore not be treated as a diagnosis of simple drunkenness. Earlier, the narrator jokes about whether wine or renewed life explains the soothsayer's dancing. The scene mixes bodily excitement, poetic speech, and a changed experience of the world. It also leaves room to ask how far the listeners understand what this intensity conveys.
As the bell sounds, Zarathustra's voice changes and the address becomes song. Images of midnight, graves, vines, wounds, ripeness, and overflowing joy carry the argument. Read the intervening sections rather than jumping from the ugliest man's declaration to the famous closing refrain. They repeatedly join delight to things that can hurt or decay.
The song also interrupts confidence about the audience. In §5, Zarathustra tells the dancers they have not flown high enough. In §8, he says the higher men do not understand him. The teacher can welcome their recovery while regarding its understanding as unfinished.
Joy wants more than compensation
In §9, suffering and joy receive contrasting desires. Suffering wants to move beyond its present state: toward maturity, descendants, a further or higher life. Joy wants itself, and with itself, recurrence. This distinction echoes the difference between treating a moment as a means to something else and wanting it again for its own sake.
But the song does not stop with the claim that pleasant moments are worth repeating. In §10, Zarathustra says that affirming one joy also affirms all suffering, because things are connected. The desired instant cannot simply be lifted out of the life and world with which it is entangled.
Consider wanting one remembered conversation to happen again. Its significance may depend on a long history: the relationship, previous misunderstandings, the circumstances that made reconciliation possible. Our example can make the attraction of the connection intelligible. It does not prove Zarathustra's much stronger claim that willing one joy entails willing the return of everything.
That distinction keeps the song from becoming a familiar calculation in which one wonderful day outweighs many bad ones. The claim concerns the whole to which the joy belongs. Section 11 intensifies it: joy longs for grief, shame, hatred, and the failures addressed before him. It is a demanding account of affirmation, and its demands should not disappear beneath the attractiveness of the refrain.
Reading 8 asked what it would mean to affirm the return of the small human being Zarathustra finds nauseating. Here the higher men stand within the world that joy desires, despite being called failures. The difficulty has acquired listeners with bodies, histories, and needs.
The connection is also a burden of argument
Does wanting a moment again require wanting every condition of its occurrence? Does that extend to every event in the world? If it does, what follows about our response to injury, cruelty, or preventable suffering? The song presses these questions without supplying a separate demonstration of its account of the connected whole.
Keep two distinctions visible. The book dramatizes an affirmation of recurrence; these chapters do not establish a physical theory through observation and proof. And affirming the return of a life cannot simply be equated with approving every act within it. The relationship between those judgments remains a problem to examine, not an exemption the guide can award the teaching.
It would be equally misleading to make the song a prescription that another person must welcome their suffering because it contributed to someone else's joy. The passage's extravagant desire still faces the question of whose experience it claims to encompass and on what grounds. Understanding its scope is part of deciding whether to accept it.
At the end, Zarathustra asks whether the higher men have learned his song and invites them to sing it themselves. The invitation matters. The text does not then certify their independent mastery. Knowing the words, participating in a shared mood, and sustaining the affirmation remain distinguishable.
The sun returns to a changed scene
“The Sign” opens the next morning. Zarathustra emerges from the cave and addresses the sun with the question that opened the book: what would its happiness be without those for whom it shines?
The repetition renews the problem of giving. Zarathustra has not simply outgrown all need for recipients. But he now distinguishes the people sleeping in his cave from the companions he seeks. They remain immersed in the night's songs while he is ready for his work.
His language introduces another difficulty. Common calls the missing capacity an “obedient ear” in their limbs. The image suggests a readiness embodied in movement and action, beyond merely hearing a message. But the demand for obedience also sits uneasily beside the instruction to leave the teacher in Reading 4. Calling it embodied understanding does not by itself resolve the tension.
The animals are awake with him. Zarathustra welcomes their responsiveness while still saying that he lacks his proper human companions. Their presence has supported him across the book; it does not supply the human community whose possibility keeps drawing him outward.
Tenderness and exclusion arrive together
Doves surround Zarathustra, and a lion lies affectionately at his feet. The strong animal rests its head on his knee and responds gently to the birds. Zarathustra weeps. These details complicate any picture of the ending as a simple hardening against all attachment.
He takes the animals' arrival as the sign that his children are near. The text reports this recognition; it does not display a completed new humanity. Nor does it identify Zarathustra as the overman whose coming he announced in the Prologue.
The lion recalls Reading 2's metamorphoses, but the comparison should remain a comparison. There the lion won freedom from commanding values and could not yet accomplish the child's creation. Here a lion appears with doves, tenderness, and Zarathustra's expectation of children. The recurrence of an animal is not a fixed code proving that every earlier stage has now been completed.
Then the higher men awaken and approach in procession to greet their host. The lion springs toward the cave with a roar, and they flee back inside. Zarathustra does not issue an order to drive them away. The animal's different responses expose the distance between his delighted recognition and their fear.
Their retreat does not make the previous evening unreal. It shows that its recovery has not made them the companions who can accompany this morning. What frightened them, and what their fear says about the standard they are expected to meet, remain questions for the reader.
The teacher names his remaining temptation
After the interruption, Zarathustra gathers his memory of the previous day. He recalls the soothsayer's promise to tempt him through the cry of distress and identifies the remaining temptation as fellow-suffering with the higher men.
Keep the severity of his response. He declares that this has had its time, dismisses his suffering and fellow-suffering, and turns from happiness toward his work. This is more forceful than a modest suggestion to manage one's time or maintain personal boundaries.
Within the story, we can understand the danger as becoming absorbed in guests whose distress and gratitude keep him attached to a task he now regards as insufficient. That interpretation explains the problem he perceives. It does not establish that leaving them is justified, that their needs no longer matter, or that his hoped-for work deserves priority whatever its costs.
The tenderness immediately before this declaration remains part of the scene. His changed face and forceful words do not erase the tears or the desire for companions. The ending gives us a transformation of attachments and priorities whose meaning we must assess.
Zarathustra announces his ripeness, calls for the great noontide, and leaves the cave. The final image repeats the morning sun. He has become ready to depart; the work itself lies beyond the narrated ending. The book neither names his destination here nor shows that his new undertaking succeeds.
A difficulty to keep in view
What would justify moving beyond the people one has helped?
The last chapters give us reasons to distinguish teaching from securing permanent dependence. The higher men's recovery can become another occasion to revere their host. A teacher committed to independent companions may have to resist the satisfaction of remaining indispensable.
Yet the language of higher possibilities can also make actual people and their needs seem expendable. Zarathustra calls the guests inadequate and makes his work the governing priority. We still need to ask what that work promises and what standing those left behind retain within it.
This brings the course back to the first lesson's burden: what justifies the rank assigned to a demanding future? The path through the book has made the question more concrete. It now involves the teacher's own resistance, the limits of his listeners, the return of suffering, and the difficulty of giving without producing discipleship.
You can recognize a changed Zarathustra without accepting every judgment by which he directs the change. A complete reading should be able to name both what he has learned and what the ending still leaves him—and us—to defend.
Check your understanding
Try answering before revealing each suggested response.
Does the guests' retreat make their happiness the night before a sham?
No. The narrator explicitly recognizes their transformation and recovery. Their retreat indicates a limit in what that recovery has made possible. Gratitude and renewed attachment to life can be real while independence and readiness remain incomplete.
Does the song say that one pleasure simply compensates for all suffering?
Its claim is stronger and different: willing one joy's recurrence entails willing the whole with which it is connected. The song goes on to describe joy actively desiring grief and failures within that whole. The connection and its implications require examination; a favorable balance of good and bad experiences does not capture them.
Why is singing the final refrain not enough to establish understanding?
Zarathustra questions his listeners' understanding during the song and ends by inviting them to learn and sing. The text does not certify that they can independently sustain the affirmation. The morning tests the difference between a shared experience and readiness for the teacher's next undertaking.
Does the lion's arrival prove that the overman has appeared?
No. Zarathustra understands the lion and doves as a sign that his children are near. The scene does not present an achieved overman or a completed new humanity. Comparing the lion with the earlier metamorphoses can illuminate the scene, but it cannot replace attention to what actually occurs.
What does the final departure establish, and what remains outside the story?
Zarathustra declares himself ready, gives priority to his work, and leaves after identifying fellow-suffering with the higher men as a temptation. The story shows this departure, with its renewed address to the sun. It does not show his future companions arriving or demonstrate the success and justification of the work ahead.
What should I write in my notes?
Write 350–450 words answering: What has Zarathustra learned by the time he leaves again, and what has he still not justified? Reopen your notes from Reading 1 and reread Prologue §1. Then revisit one passage from “Redemption,” “The Stillest Hour,” or “The Convalescent.”
- Use one detail from the opening to explain Zarathustra's original expectation about giving, listeners, or the human future.
- Use the middle passage you chose to show how that expectation becomes a difficulty for the teacher himself.
- Use one detail from each of the final chapters to explain what has changed. Distinguish the guests' recovery from their independence and Zarathustra's declared readiness from demonstrated success.
- Identify one unresolved demand in his ideal. Whose suffering must it answer to, or what reason must it supply before you would accept its priority?
Finish by revising the sentence you wrote at the beginning: Before I could accept Zarathustra's ideal, I would need to understand…
A strong response follows an actual change through the narrative, supports its judgment with specific moments, and leaves a precise question. You can conclude that Zarathustra has learned something significant while remaining unconvinced by part of what he asks.
Continue the reading
You have completed the ten-reading introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Return to Reading 1: What Could Humanity Become? and compare your original question with the one that now remains. The ending gives the opening a different weight without turning it into a solved puzzle.
For a complete reading of the book, use the Prologue and four-part walkthrough to restore the encounters, speeches, and songs around these selections. Follow a recurring image through several scenes and note how its meaning changes with the speaker, listener, and situation.
The Gay Science book guide offers related scenes of failed reception and the challenge of recurrence. Compare their compact form with Zarathustra's extended education as a teacher, keeping the books' publication stages in view.