nriched me with new anguishes and instructed me how to transform misfortune, bitterness, and uncertainty into pride; Zorba taught me to love life and have no fear of death (Kazantzakis, Report to Greco 445).
In the novel, Kazantzakis dramatizes what is at heart a debate between two men, Zorba and the boss. The boss is a scholarly ascetic, and Zorba, the symbol of the Greek idea of the vitality of life, yet also a naive, trusting man:
The conflict which is faced by the scholar-narrator of the myth-history is the traditional one between "body" and "mind-soul"; but in the center, the fulcrum of the two poles, is the yawning Buddhist Nothing which acts as the central force of the entire work (Doulis 36).
Lewis A. Richards indicates that in 1967 Kazantzakis was still a relatively unknown author in the United
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