Symbolic Images of Butterflies in Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek

Abstract

Perhaps one of the most significant animal images employed by Nikos Kazantzakis in Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba (1946) is that of butterflies—with the possible exception of a parrot in its cage. He makes repeated use of butterflies throughout the entire novel, one of the most wellknown works of modern Greek and world literature. Although the image of the caged parrot symbolically promotes a tragic view of the human condition, that of the butterflies has a variety of different meanings. In other words, the symbolic meanings of the butterflies vary greatly depending on the context in which the symbol is used. It explains, at least in part, that the images of the butterflies is not merely applicable to one particular character but to the various characters of the novel. Inarguably, Kazantzskis uses these images as a way to underscore the varied themes of the novel: the futility of human aspiration, spiritual rebirth, lost youth, human mortality, articitic creativity, among many other things. The image of butterflies is introduced early in Zorba the Greek. In Chapter 8, the rainy weather makes the unnamed first-person narrator, whom Alexis Zorba affectionately calls “Boss,” so emotional and sentimental that he feels almost like bursting into tears. He compares a drooping human soul to a rain-soaked butterfly: “These entirely sorrowful hours of light rain are sensual, as if your soul, a butterfly, were being drenched and thereby forced to sink into the ground” (107). All the bitter memories, hidden like rainwater in the depths of his mind, suddenly come to the surface. In this sentimental mood, the narrator goes on to say that lost hopes resemble “wingless butterflies reduced to worms that now creep over your heart’s essence, devouring it” (107). In this scene, the butterflies connote not only the human soul but also the futility of human aspiration. By contrast, the cocoon, inside which the pupa of many moths is protected, is closely related to the human body and its mundaneness. https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2165433