Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

When I read Zorba the Greek, I determined the personality traits of each characters. However, during the Interactive Orals, each presentation gave me more insight into why Kazantzakis portrayed each character in a distinct, unique way. Foremost, understanding Kazantzakis’ personal life influence was an imperative basis for my ability to conceptualize the novel. For instance, we discussed and concluded that Kazantzakis’ view of women paralleled that of Alexis Zorba’s was insightful into how Zorba’s disregard for women was developed.

Kazantzakis, a Greek writer, demonstrates the influence of Greece through his apparent portrayal of each character to traits equivalent to those portrayed by the gods or goddesses in Greek mythology. In the instance of Athena, we debated on whether Zorba or the narrator portrayed stronger characteristics of this greek goddess. While the class remained divided, this opened my mind to the idea that the god or goddess Kazantzakis portrays in a character are most similar to his personal ideology of said character. In the case of Zorba, this connected to the discussion determining that Kazantzakis was much like Zorba in view of females. Zorba is also written as the character aligned to Zeus, the most powerful god in Greek mythology. This rose my conclusion that Kazantzakis portrays his characters as the more important, the more they parallel connections to his personal life.

Another example can be seen by Kazantzakis’ personal friend, Angelos Sikelianos, as the narrator. The narrator is portrayed as a diligent intellectual. Kazantzakis compares the narrator to the Greek god of truth and prophecy, Apollo, and the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena. Through this, it is apparent that Kazantzakis had saw his friend, Sikelianos, as a valued intellectual, and chose to portray these traits in one of his main characters. This idea really opened my concept of the entire novel because as a result of knowing the influence of real life events historically, culturally, and personally which can be seen in the writing of Zorba the Greek, it has the ability to deliver a stronger message to anyone who has this insight. It provides each aspect of the novel with validity in society when Kazantzakis crafted it. This ultimately lead me to the conclusion that when Kazantzakis developed Zorba the Greek, despite it being a work of fiction, the novel is based on real influences which validate the novel to a greater magnitude than I once held.