 Within Nietzsche’s corpus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra has a controversial place, owing mainly to its peculiar literary style. Nietzsche speaks in parables and short narratives populated by fictional characters—“the hunchback,” “the ugliest man,” “the soothsayer,” “the saint,” “the tightrope walker,” “the jester,” and “the Last Man,” to name a few—leaving their philosophical import open to a variety of interpretations. One of Nietzsche’s most well-known and morally troubling figures—the superhuman—also appears substantially only in this work, rendering it questionable to some interpreters whether this ideal of supreme human health is central to Nietzsche’s thought as a whole. There is also some interpretive uncertainty about whether the work, which was written across the span of three years, properly ends triumphantly at the conclusion of the Third Part, thus situating the psychologically complex Fourth Part as a question-raising supplement, or whether the book’s narrative moves smoothly and progressively across the entire four parts.