Zorba the Greek

Spending time in Crete ignites conflict between the narrator’s modernity, his education, his attachment to reason and logic, and the irrational, more authentic perspectives of Zorba and the villagers. At the beginning of his sojourn, the narrator mentions that renting and operating the lignite mind is a means of overcoming his “bookworm” identity. The narrator feels that he has reached an impasse where the world of ideas he inhabits has only led to spiritual malaise. He aspires to reach a point of self-sufficient contentment through this close contact with the villagers, as well as a more active life, but for all the beauty the narrator encounters, peasant life in proves brutal. Zorba allows him to see that authenticity is not found in external concepts like tradition and modernity, but in individual lived experience.

Zorba plays a central role in this clash between tradition and modernity, as a mediatory figure between the narrator and the villagers. Zorba is also a figure from the narrator’s cultural past, resembling the travelers who used to tell the narrator’s grandfather stories in exchange for hospitality. Unlike the villagers, Zorba’s wide experiences allow him to transcend blind submission to ideas of God and religion, and allow him to connect with the narrator. At the same time, the narrator and Zorba differ in their approach to tradition. Full of abstract ideas about his exchanges with the workers, the narrator first dreams of educating them, but finds his plans foiled when Zorba suggests he keep them at arm’s length. In Zorba’s view, educating the villagers about ideas of equality or justice would bear no fruit.

As the novel unfolds, local tradition is shown to be bankrupt and not a haven for the narrator’s aspirations of authenticity. The monks at the monastery are mad and murderous, and social mores are enforced through barbaric violence, such as when the widow is stoned and then decapitated. Even Madame Hortense’s death is accompanied by thieving. Zorba’s tendency to use tradition for his individual gain is no worse than these displays of hypocrisy and self-interest.

In Zorba the Greek, Kazantzakis proposes that experience is the ideal source of fulfillment, not tradition or modernity. In accepting the widow’s murder and the cable railway’s failure, the narrator achieves the self-sufficient contentment that he sought. As opposed to tradition and modernity, which are both oriented outward, experience as the narrator observes it from Zorba, and later emulates according to his own limits, is grounded in bodily experience. That the narrator later produces a manuscript detailing his time with Zorba further emphasizes the value of experience.