subtext

The fool, the prophet and the the saint: where is Fred in all of this? Why, he’s the author of course. The author is dead, or so say lit crits since the mid 60’s. Should we care that he went nuts soon after, does it matter now to how we read the book? Yes, no, both of course simultaneously and neither. It is a narrative, not a philosophical tract, yet it is, as is Plato’s construction of Socrates and his “talks” with his boys. I think a good question to ask is: what is afforded by writing Zarathustra the way it is written? Fred could have explicated his ideas in a standard philosophical treatise, no? Why a narrative that uses the genres and tropes of religion, tragedy, quest, parables, and riddles? In the prologue Zarathustra gripes that no one has the ears to hear what he is saying, perhaps Fred was trying to embed the need to interpret the world as one will in a book where “God” a prevailing world view “is dead.” When what one is saying is being interpreted in ways unintended, as Zarathustra to the crowd waiting for the tightrope walker, and one has already declared that an absolute meaning (god) does not exist, then isn’t the only path open one where any number of creative interpretations become legitimate. All ways are my way as the Queen told Alice. We are all the center of an infinite universe, as I have said before. All ways are one way: kind of like Joe Campbell and the Masks of God, I guess.