Nikos Kazantzakis in his Novel Zorba the Greek

Zorba and the boss learn from wizard another just now emerge essentially unchanged in their orientations. Another influence found in this written report is that of Nietzsche, as noted, and here the melodic theme of Zorba as incipient ubermensch emerges.

Kazantzakis in his autobiography makes reference to the most important influences in his bearing, though he does indicate as well that he has do most of it himself:

Very few people, living or dead, submit aided my struggle. If however, I wished to put which people left their traces engraft most deeply in my soul, I would perhaps designate Homer, Buddha, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Zorba. . . Nietzsche enriched me with new anguishes and instructed me how to transform misfortune, bitterness, and uncertainty into pride; Zorba taught me to love career and have no fear of death (Kazantzakis, Report to Greco 445).

In the tonic, Kazantzakis dramatizes what is at heart a debate between fundamental men, Zorba and the boss. The boss is a scholarly ascetic, and Zorba, the symbol of the Greek idea of the vitality of life, yet also a naive, trusting universe:

The conflict which is faced by the scholar-narrator of the myth-history is the traditional one between "body" and "mind-soul"; but in the center, the fulcrum of the two poles, is the yawning Buddhist Nothing which acts as the central force of the entire work (Doul

Lewis A. Richards indicates that in 1967 Kazantzakis was still a relatively unknown author in the United States and that secondary criticism had been addressed to his works. Richards states that one of the reasons why Kazantzakis may not have caught on with the American public was his dedication to Nietzschean school of thought, especially the strong belief in the superman. Richards finds that essentially Kazantzakis has a demoralised outlook that is evident in his fiction and that fits with elements in Nietzschean philosophy as to the death of God and the need for human beings to befit responsible for themselves (Richards 49-51).

Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil comments on the tendency of psychologists to place the instinct for self-preservation in the role of the cardinal instinct of the organic being, but Nietzsche differs in this view and writes:

Kazantzakis espouses a philosophy of absolute freedom that recalls Nietzsche's description of the superman as one who can become god:

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of catastrophe and the Case of Wagner, Kaufmann, Walter (tr.). New York: Vintage, 1967.

Kazantzakis makes the same distinction regarding horticulture but does not seem to have abandoned the value of culture as Nietzsche did. He agrees with the younger Nietzsche about the importance of celebrating life in culture, which is precisely what he does through the person of Zorba in this novel. Zorba was a real person celebrated in this novel by his friend, Kazantzakis, who calls the novel a "memorial":

Zorba takes his place beside the massive thinkers who influenced Kazantzakis because he, in his own peculiar way, impressed the author with the limitations of knowledge. Zorba's bound is an affirmation of life as against the words which try to hoodwink it. It is the Dionysian union with the unintelligible. But the paradox is a Nietzschean one. even so in order to posit the Dionysian chaos, one ask words of the ordering tools of the mind. Zorba
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