After the completion of Zarathustra Nietzsche felt as if a weight had been lifted from him. The matter and the peculiar expressive manner of that book had been accumulating within him since his days at Pforta and had at length found impassioned release. The aftermath was not a feeling of exhaustion but one of freedom and new vigour. He now had a working hypothesis—the will to power—and he proceeded to develop it in a series of books comparable with the pre-Zarathustra trilogy: Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Towards a Genealogy of Morals (1887) and Twilight of the Idols (written 1888, published 1889). Stylistically these works are as different from Human, All Too Human as Human, All Too Human is from The Birth of Tragedy. There has been a marrying of the clarity and concision of the ‘free-thinking’ period with the passion of Zarathustra, and the child is a style of passionate conciseness that is seen to have been the style he was aiming for all along:

The aphoristic form is gradually abandoned, but the spirit of aphorism—the summation of a lengthy process of thought in a single striking sentence— remains. In this sense Gotzen-Dammerung, the shortest of Nietzsche's important works, is an aphoristic summary of his entire thought.

The background to these publications (and to the short books of 1888 to be discussed later) is the unpublished material intended for what was to have been Nietzsche's major undertaking of the post-Zarathustra years: a largescale summary of his work called variously The Will to Power and The Revaluation of all Values.