Thus Spoke Zarathustra

A philosophical narrative in four parts, written in a biblical, poetic style and published between 1883 and 1885, the last part in a small private printing. It follows Zarathustra, a prophet named after the Persian founder of Zoroastrianism, who comes down from ten years of solitude in the mountains to teach. In the Prologue he tells a crowd in a market square that God is dead and announces the Übermensch, or overhuman, as the meaning of the earth, contrasting it with the 'last man', comfortable and small, whom the crowd prefers. The speeches that follow include the three metamorphoses of the spirit, from camel to lion to child, and attacks on pity, the state and the despisers of the body. Zarathustra introduces the will to power and, with great difficulty, the thought of eternal recurrence: the test of willing one's whole life to return endlessly. Part Four gathers a group of 'higher men' in his cave.

It is Nietzsche's most famous book and the main source for his ideas of the Übermensch and eternal recurrence, and it asks what could give life meaning once traditional values have collapsed.