Zorba the Greek

The novel opens with the narrator in a cafe in Piraeus waiting to depart for Crete. The narrator watches sailors talk while feeling despondent over losing his friend, who has gone to fight in the Caucasus. His friend asked the narrator to come with him, but the narrator did not feel compelled to go. However, he is saddened by losing his friend and struggles to control himself. The friend proposes a game where, if one of them feels that the other is in danger, they will think of them so intensely as to warn him. The narrator agrees though he claims not to be superstitious. His friend has prompted the narrator to pursue a life of action. He has decided to rent a lignite mine and live with workmen. However, the narrator still takes his manuscript with him.

As he prepares to look for verses in Dante’s Divine Comedy to “control” the day, a man approaches him and asks to go with him (22). The man introduces himself as Alexis Zorba and offers to cook for the narrator. The narrator likes the man’s boldness and bluntness. Zorba carries his instrument, the santuri, with him and relates how he learned to play from a Turkish man. Playing the santuri, he tells the narrator, requires passion and commitment. Zorba overhears one of the sailors talking about sleeping with his wife while facing mortal danger at sea and tells the narrator, “they really know the secret” (27). Impressed by Zorba’s worldliness, the narrator hires him to oversee the mine’s workers and to entertain him by playing the santuri. Zorba accepts but clarifies he will only play, sing, and even dance if he feels like it because he is free.

The narrator is on the ship to Crete. He’s disgusted by the other Greek travelers on the boat, who make him want to grasp “the steamship at both ends, dunk it into the sea, shaking it thoroughly to rid it of every living thing defiling it — people, rats, bedbugs” (27). He also feels “compassion” for all life (28). While on the ship, the narrator and Zorba talk about obstacles. Zorba had mentioned cutting off his finger because it got in the way when operating a pottery wheel. The narrator compares this to the story of a man who castrated himself over his desire. Zorba objects to the comparison, disagreeing with the narrator who explains that in the story, the man had removed his obstacle to Heaven, and argues it had actually been his “key to Paradise” (30). The narrator reads a book of Buddha’s dialogues with a shepherd and feels comforted even in the raging sea. That night he dreams of the shepherd losing everything.

The morning brings them closer to Crete. Zorba tells the narrator about fighting with the rebels during the Cretan Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. According to Zorba, a man is a “wild animal” as a young man (33). The narrator, he claims, can’t understand due to his privileged and sheltered upbringing. This shames the narrator. Zorba asks why liberty comes out of so much bloodshed. He wonders how God can reward violence with liberty, something the narrator himself can’t explain. Zorba states that he is angry, but that feeling has no point. He mentions his happiness when Crete was freed.

The narrator draws from Zorba’s story the notion that “to have a passion to amass pieces of gold and suddenly to conquer one’s passion and throw the treasure to the four winds” (36). The narrator sees the mine after they berth by the shore. They head to the village, led by two boys. At a cafe there, the men in the village mention the inn of a French woman and former cabaret singer, Madame Hortense. They also offer their own lodgings, but the narrator and Zorba opt to stay at Madame Hortense’s. When the narrator sees her, he immediately thinks of The Tempest, an impression that’s solidified when Zorba is immediately attracted to her.

The narrator and Zorba spend the night in Hortense’s hotel. In the morning, the narrator surveys the mine since work will begin in the coming days. The narrator is charmed by Crete, which he sees as having a “solemn, austere landscape” (42). The narrator sees vestiges of the past in the peasants’ demeanor. Despite enjoying his surroundings, the narrator is tormented by his fears and turns to his reading. Zorba finds him and calls him in for a meal. The narrator at first replies that he isn’t hungry. In fact, he “had despised such pleasures of the flesh” for years and would have preferred to eat covertly, as if it were something shameful, but he goes with Zorba, who insists (45).

They meet with Mavrandoni, the village elder who rented the mine to the narrator. He tells them it is improper for them to stay at Madame Hortense’s and offers his home, but they decline. During their meal, Zorba invites Madame Hortense to eat with them, which flatters her. Hortense relates her past romances with the English, Russian, French, and Italian admirals who governed Crete after the Insurrection of 1897. Hortense claims she pleaded on behalf of Crete, saving the island from being destroyed to the ingratitude of the villagers. The admirals eventually gave her money but left her behind. Zorba nicknames her Bouboulina, after the heroine of Greek independence, and continues to woo her by playing the santuri. The narrator notes that Zorba is not drawn to Hortense as an individual so much as the “entire female of the species” (54). Hortense responds, and Zorba asks the narrator to give them privacy.