Part IV of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is generally considered to be one of the most puzzling aspects of this deeply puzzling work. Although Nietzsche subtitles it the “Fourth and Last Part,” and although he concludes it with the phrase “End of Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” interpreters who approach his book in a straightforward literal fashion have tended to agree that the ending to Part III contains the book's real conclusion and that Part IV was added later as an unfortunate afterthought.

In recent years, however, defenders of an ironic reading of Zarathustra have offered their textually faithful treatment of Part IV as evidence of the correctness of their alternative approach. Nietzsche, they argue, certainly intended Part IV to be an integral and concluding section of his book. And it is true, therefore, that the contents and position of Part IV tend to undermine the natural development and culmination in the parts which precede it. But this, they claim, is simply proof of Nietzsche's intent to satirize and deflate, not only the ostensible progress of Zarathustra and his teachings, but also our need to find such progress and to read his book in a traditional linear fashion.

In this chapter, I argue that the literalists' approach to reading Nietzsche's Zarathustra is still the correct approach, but that recent ironist readers are right to protest the literalists' tendency to marginalize Part IV of this work.