Nietzschean individualism

Nietzschean individualism is the doctrine Martin Eden embraces to explain his opposition to socialism and his contempt for democratic convention: he imagines a world ruled by exceptional, self-sufficient individuals rather than by the many. Yet the novel makes the creed more than a political position. It becomes a test of Martin’s identity, repeatedly unsettled by the human attachments he cannot dismiss and, at sea, by his growing uncertainty that any philosophy can supply a reason to live.

Doctrine and Social Order

Martin presents himself as an uncompromising reactionary who has turned away from the democratic ideals that once influenced him. He distinguishes his individualism from what he regards as the merchants’ timid pursuit of money and from a democracy he sees as socialism disguised in language. In his account, society’s talk of strength is hollow: people profess to believe in the survival and rule of the strong but shrink from what those principles would actually entail. Martin claims to believe them without compromise.

His ideal is aristocratic rather than commercial. He looks not to the state for protection or improvement but to the exceptional individual, figured as The man on horseback, who might rescue the state from its own weakness. Invoking Nietzsche, he associates genuine strength with nobility, refusal to compromise, and an affirmative willingness to act. Against this ideal he sets what he calls the slave morality of the meek and lowly, which he believes cannot preserve those who submit to it. His declaration that he is one of very few true individualists in Oakland gives the doctrine a deliberately isolating force: it marks him as separate from the political crowd as well as from ordinary social expectations.

This is Martin’s interpretation of Nietzsche, not a detached account of a philosophical system. Its sharp division between strong individuals and the many gives him a vocabulary for resistance, but also encourages him to treat social dependence as proof of weakness. The doctrine promises independence from collective values while placing Martin in conflict with nearly everyone around him.

Political Challenge and Rival Explanations

The contrast becomes explicit in Brissenden’s challenge to Martin. Seriously ill after repeated hemorrhages, Brissenden urges him to speak at a socialist meeting, not because he expects Martin to agree, but because he wants him to state his opposition publicly and risk being challenged. He believes socialism may give Martin a sanction for continuing to live through the disappointment he expects will come. The invitation turns Martin’s theory into a practical test: he must defend it before the people he dismisses rather than hold it as a private badge of distinction.

Brissenden offers a rival account of historical power. He argues that socialism is inevitable because the existing system cannot endure and the many will not allow a would-be strong ruler to take command. He does not claim to admire the crowd; instead, he treats its numbers and material power as facts that Martin’s aristocratic ideal cannot wish away. Their disagreement therefore concerns not only which political order is desirable, but whether Martin’s ideal can operate in a society shaped by collective forces. Brissenden’s impending death lends his challenge urgency, while his own acceptance of socialism shows that political conviction does not make him personally hopeful or well.

The Social Cost of the Creed

Martin’s ideas widen the distance between him and his working-class family. After Bernard Higginbotham forbids him from the house because Martin has brought public disgrace upon the family, Gertrude asks him to leave, find a job, and return after the scandal has passed. Martin cannot explain his position to her. He understands their idea of responsible conduct as beginning and ending with employment, and sees their advice as a symptom of people trapped in the very subordination they accept. As he thinks of work as their golden idol, the distance between his political language and their immediate need for security becomes stark.

The scene also exposes the material limit of his independence. Martin refuses Gertrude’s offer of money, although he knows he will soon need to visit the pawnbroker. His refusal preserves his self-conception, but it does not make him economically self-sufficient. Gertrude, meanwhile, offers a concrete form of support: even while warning him not to approach Bernard, she says she will come whenever Martin sends for her and suggests he may later take a delivery-wagon job. Her terms are practical and familial, not philosophical.

When Gertrude leaves weeping, Martin feels sorrow at the sight of her and recognizes her as someone trampled by the strong. The recognition shakes the abstract structure of his belief. He sees that his sister’s vulnerability cannot be reduced to an example of a class he despises, because his pity for her is personal and immediate. He also recognizes the paradox: the compassion that disrupts his pose is precisely what his own doctrine has classified as part of the morality of the weak. His response is not to resolve the contradiction, but to measure himself against it and find his Nietzschean identity unstable.

Intimacy, Compassion, and Self-Revision

The same conflict surfaces in Martin’s reunion with Lizzie Connolly. During their time together, she tells him she has remained faithful through the years. Martin believes her, and understands that he could make her happy by marrying her and taking her to the Marquesas Islands. The possibility has real emotional force: he wants to offer her the happiness she has been denied. Yet he refuses, telling her that he is not a marrying man. The decision is not presented as a simple victory for self-command. Martin recognizes that the old days of license and easy living are gone, and that he cannot return to them; he has changed, though he has not fully understood the change until faced with Lizzie’s love.

After Lizzie leaves in tears, Martin reproaches himself for being neither a brute nor a convincing Nietzschean. He believes he would marry her if he could, and feels the shame of being unable to give her the happiness he can imagine. His reflection does not make him act differently, but it makes visible the cost of his decision. The doctrine’s ideal of an individual above ordinary obligation cannot erase his awareness of another person’s pain. His compassion becomes evidence not simply against his philosophy, but against the identity he has tried to build around it.

Doubt and Narrative Significance

On the voyage aboard the Mariposa, Martin encounters a socialist quartermaster who presses leaflets and pamphlets on him and expounds the morality of the oppressed. Martin listens and recalls Nietzsche’s doubt about truth. For the first time, he allows that perhaps Nietzsche was right to question whether truth exists at all. The moment does not lead him to adopt socialism; instead, his mind quickly tires, and he returns to his chair to doze. Its significance lies in the faltering of certainty: the intellectual framework that once gave him a sharp position against society no longer commands his attention or steadies him.

That doubt belongs to a broader collapse in the value of what Martin has achieved. Travelling first class and sitting at the captain’s right hand, he occupies a world he once imagined from the ship’s forecastle and coal-hold as paradise. Now he cannot recover that earlier longing, nor find a new one in his elevated position. The former outsider has entered the privileged space without discovering the happiness he had attached to it. His individualism, once a language of strength and distinction, cannot reconcile social triumph with inner emptiness. The novel’s treatment of the doctrine thus turns on a sustained contradiction: Martin insists that the strong must stand beyond the crowd, but his attachments, economic vulnerability, and final philosophical weariness reveal how little any person’s life can be separated from dependence, loss, and uncertainty.