48 pages • 1 hour read
Nikos KazantzakisZorba the Greek
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1946A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Buddha
Throughout his time in Crete, the narrator is consumed with writing his play, Buddha, and his meditations on the Buddha. The narrator can’t leave this play behind when he sets off for Crete, despite his desire to lead an earthier and less intellectual existence. While in Crete, the narrator often considers how the Buddha represents distance and self-sufficiency. Reading The Dialogues of Buddha and the Shepherd, where the Buddha claims contentment despite having no material belongings, gives tranquility to the narrator, who seeks to transcend his existential concerns and physical desires.
The narrator finds solace in the concept of the Buddha and the idea of negation. In the face of Zorba’s challenge to the narrator’s idealism regarding the peasants, the narrator seeks to use that figure to have attachment for his fellow men without seeing himself as part of them. When the narrator is unable to explain to Zorba how he can offer the peasants a worldview better than their regressive one, he feels agitated and ends up writing feverishly, trying to recuperate his sense of purpose.
The narrator adopts a similar strategy in the face of the temptation that the widow represents, writing his Buddha play by channeling his impulse to go to her into self-denial. The narrator reaches an epiphany that the Buddha has become an organizing principle in his life, like God, and he needs to leave it behind, like he left behind his ideas of God and the world of ideas in general. This conflict resolves when he feels his body taking him to see the widow. Though the narrator is briefly consumed by self-doubt, Zorba’s words eventually give him the courage to approach her and ask to be let into her home. The morning after this tryst, the narrator finishes his manuscript and feels liberated.
Dance
Dancing plays an important role in Zorba the Greek as a public expression of masculinity and emotion. Zorba first mentions dancing when he asks to accompany the narrator to Crete. He specifies that he can dance the zeibekiko and hasapiko, but will only do so if he feels like it, immediately establishing dancing an outlet for powerful feelings, something personal that must be deeply felt. The narrator’s claim that coal is not their ultimate aim with the mine, but simply a cover for their time together, makes Zorba dance with joy because words are not sufficient. As the narrator watches Zorba dance, he understands the movement as a clash between Zorba’s uncontrollable inner self and the boundaries imposed on him by his material body. This emotion need not be joy, since Zorba mentions dancing after losing his son, an action that channeled his pain and saved him from madness.
While dancing is personal and deeply felt, it is also a form of communication for Zorba, one that transcends nationalities and cultures. He tells the narrator how he befriended a Russian woman and communicated with her through dance, despite Zorba’s paltry Russian. Near the end of the novel, the narrator asks Zorba to teach him how to dance; this represents a higher level of communication between them where Zorba’s body can express what his words cannot. For the narrator, a writer who is attached to words, dancing appears transgressive and liberating.
At the same time, for all the radical individuality Zorba’s dancing embodies, the dancer himself is also integrated into his community and the material world in Zorba the Greek. Zorba dances at seeing spring arrive in Crete, expressing how moved he is at the changing of the season. It is not just Zorba himself who dances. The narrator watches a young shepherd dance during the village’s Easter festivities, demonstrating his youthful abandon and his roots in the Cretan community.
History
In Zorba the Greek, history is material, something that can be put to use, and Zorba is the canny figure who demonstrates how. From the beginning, the novel depicts how Cretan history is embodied in the landscape. As the narrator writes, “every stone and tree, here on Cretan soil, has its tragic history” (38). The landscape also includes the people, which the novel shows when the narrator encounters some peasant girls. The girls are apprehensive of him as an outsider, behavior he interprets as originating in the history of Corsair assaults on Crete, where they would steal women. The girls’ caution melts away when the narrator lets them pass with a smile, which he takes as an acknowledgment that that historical danger is past.
Zorba puts history to use in his interactions with Hortense, manifesting history in the present in a way that values the individual. For instance, Hortense’s relationship with history centers on her affairs with the Great Powers that ruled over Crete for a time. She tells Zorba and the narrator of how she pleaded to the Italian admiral, Canavaro, on behalf of the Cretans, so that the island wouldn’t be harmed. In return, Zorba calls Hortense Bouboulina, after the heroine of Greek independence, acknowledging the heroism of her actions to woo her. Throughout the novel Zorba presents himself as Canavaro. The narrator teases Zorba about remaining unruffled when Hortense’s parrot calls him by another man’s name, only to hear Zorba admit that when he feels the parrot call him by that name, he feels like the admiral. This statement proves especially poignant after Hortense dies and Zorba claims that he pleased her like no other man. In becoming Canavaro and calling Hortense Bouboulina, Zorba rewrites her personal history, recognizing her worth and devoting all his attention to her, unlike the admiral who left her behind. In contrast to the narrator’s scene with the peasant girls, here Zorba is self-conscious about his use of history to treat Hortense with kindness.
Zorba also uses history to mock those who would abuse it, but it proves to be too powerful a force and easily co-opted. When he and the narrator visit the monastery and witness the corruption there, Zorba encourages one of the mad monks to set it on fire. After the monk does this and dies from unrelated circumstances, Zorba covertly transports his body back to the chapel. He uses the story of Our Lady of Revenge, the virgin who slaughtered the Algerian force that had attacked the monastery, to make the monk’s death look like another instance of her vengeance. The monks take what they see as the repetition of history. To Zorba’s dismay, the corrupt monks decide they will go around Crete spreading word of this “miracle” and collecting alms to profit from the villagers.
Literature
Literature is the prism through which the narrator engages with the world around him. Eventually he reaches a point where he no longer needs to rely on literature. This is not a wholesale rejection of literature, but rather an appreciation of art as a synthesis of spirit and experience, represented by how the narrator pens his experience with Zorba at the novel’s end.
Literature as a counter to action appears through the narrator’s memories of his friend who had called him a “bookworm.” Attempting to establish himself as a man of action, the narrator rents the lignite mine. However, he takes his manuscript with him. Both before he leaves and as soon as he arrives in Crete, the narrator turns to Dante’s poetry to structure his days. He also writes about Buddha to keep his anxiety at bay.
The narrator relates to the people around him through what he has read. He compares his first meeting with Hortense to a scene from The Tempest. The narrator repeatedly compares Zorba to Sinbad the Sailor, the hero from A Thousand and One Nights. During the Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter, as well as his trips to religious institutions, the narrator connects the biblical tale of Jesus to his own experiences. He is drawn to the happiness of festivities during Christmas Eve despite not being a believer. When he goes to the monastery, the narrator relates the trek to Jesus’s climb of Golgotha, as well as his doubt and suffering.
However, the longer the narrator stays in Crete, the less he relies solely on literature. He learns that melding literature and personal experience grants the fulfillment he craves. The narrator mentions his growing dissatisfaction with Mallarme’s poetry upon returning to it. He frenziedly works on his manuscript on the Buddha to combat his attraction to the widow, but it’s only after he gives in to that attraction that he can finally finish the work.
A similar incident occurs after his stay in Crete. After receiving a letter from Zorba, the narrator is tempted to answer and go to him. Just as he reacted to his desire for the widow, the narrator throws himself into other activities as a distraction. However, it isn’t until he decides to chronicle his experience with Zorba that he finds contentment. He realizes he does not need to see Zorba again. What he needs is to render his own past experience into art, to synthesize it and ultimately achieve fulfillment.
