The Blissful Islands are a sea-bound setting where Zarathustra lives among friends, leaves by ship, and repeatedly tests the difference between separation and renewed hope. Their importance is not confined to geography: they are a place people can depart from and seek again, but also an image Zarathustra insists remains possible when the Prophet declares that no such islands exist. Later, Zarathustra connects them to his gardens and to the children who embody his highest hopes, giving the setting a future-facing significance.

Setting and Maritime Geography

The narrative places the Blissful Islands within a wider seascape of islands, ridges, harbours, and ships. One nearby island, not far from them, is dominated by a continually smoking volcano. The people there, especially the old women, tell that the mountain stands like a stone block before the gate of the underworld, whose narrow downward path passes through the volcano. This is a local account about a neighbouring island, not a description of the Blissful Islands themselves; its proximity nevertheless places Zarathustra’s island world beside an unsettling landscape shaped by legend and the imagined route to the underworld.

Ships make the islands a place of movement rather than a sealed refuge. At a good harbour on the farther shore, foreign vessels drop anchor and take aboard people who wish to leave the Blissful Islands and cross the sea. Zarathustra plans to use that harbour himself. The detail matters: departure is not merely a figure of speech in his story, but a practical possibility built into the island geography. The islands hold his friends and a life he can leave, while the sea opens beyond them without immediately disclosing what awaits on the other side.

Disappearance, Rumour, and Return

During the time Zarathustra is living on the Blissful Islands, a ship anchors at the nearby volcano island. Its crew land to shoot rabbits. Around noon, when the captain and sailors have gathered again, they see a man coming through the air. A voice announces that the time has come; the figure passes swiftly like a shadow toward the volcano. The sailors recognise Zarathustra, whom all but the captain have seen before and whom they love with a mixture of affection and awe. Their old steersman interprets the sight as Zarathustra going to Hell.

The apparition coincides with a rumour at the Blissful Islands that Zarathustra has disappeared. His friends report that he boarded a ship by night without telling them where he intended to sail. The unannounced departure, the uncanny sight near the smoking volcano, and the sailors’ story combine into a public explanation that the Devil has carried him off. Zarathustra’s disciples laugh at the claim; one answers that it would be more plausible for Zarathustra to have carried off the Devil. Their amusement, however, does not erase their private apprehension or longing. When Zarathustra appears among them on the fifth day, their joy registers the change from anxious absence to reunion. The island episode turns an ordinary departure by ship into a tale of supernatural disappearance, while leaving the decisive fact plain: he is absent, and then he returns.

The Wanderer’s Departure

A later departure unfolds not as a public mystery but as a solitary passage through the island landscape. At midnight Zarathustra climbs over a ridge so that he can reach the other shore by early dawn and board a ship. As he climbs, he recalls the lonely wanderings of his youth and the many mountains, ridges, and summits he has already crossed. His inward account of himself joins physical movement to a recurring disposition: he is a wanderer and mountain-climber, dislikes plains, and cannot remain settled for long.

The journey also shapes how Zarathustra understands whatever may still happen to him. He expects fate and experience to contain further wandering and climbing, and concludes that, in the final analysis, one experiences only oneself. The passage therefore presents departure as more than travel away from the islands. The ridge and the crossing continue a pattern already established in his remembered life, while the intended ship offers a new route without promising escape from the self carried along it.

Four days’ journey from the Blissful Islands and from his friends, Zarathustra has overcome the pain he carried across the sea. He accepts his destiny again, triumphantly and with firm feet, and describes himself as alone by choice, with the open sea and pure sky around him. The afternoon recalls the hour at which he found his friends, both for the first time and on a later occasion, but the current solitude is not presented simply as their loss. The islands remain a point of reference in his movement away from them; distance gives him room to regain an affirmative relation to his fate.

The Islands as an Image of Hope

The name of the Blissful Islands becomes contested when the Prophet sighs over the prospect of finding happiness among people he regards as buried and hermit-like. He wonders whether ultimate happiness must be sought far away among forgotten seas, then collapses into the claim that seeking is useless and that no blissful islands remain. Zarathustra answers with immediate, vigorous denial. He says that he knows better and that the islands still exist, then refuses to let the Prophet’s sighing settle into the final word. He describes himself as already drenched by the other’s affliction and says he will shake himself free and run away to become dry again. The exchange makes the islands a counter-image to resignation: Zarathustra insists on their continued possibility, even as he acknowledges the weight of another person’s despair.

Later, among his guests, Zarathustra asks to hear about his gardens, the Blissful Islands, and his beautiful new race. He presents his children as the reason he is rich and the cause for which he has become poor, and calls them the living garden and trees of life of his will and highest hope. His longing overwhelms him as he speaks: he closes his eyes and mouth, and the guests fall silent and still. The islands are thus joined to an anticipated generation, not merely to private comfort or the recollection of friends. Across departure, return, and the image of children still on their way, the setting gathers together actual distance and hoped-for futurity. Its meaning lies in the tension between leaving a cherished place and continuing to affirm what may yet grow from it.