“America, America, Blasphemous Dream”: Nietzsche’s Metamorphoses and the Immigrant’s Existential Crisis in The Fortunate Pilgrim

Abstract

 Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim traces the existential and cultural dissonance that shapes the Angeluzzi-Corbo family’s struggle to reconcile inherited Italian values with the demands of American individualism. Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Three Metamorphoses” from Thus Spake Zarathustra, this analysis frames Lucia Santa as the “great dragon,” a figure who enforces ancestral authority and preserves inherited values. Her children occupy various stages of Nietzsche’s spiritual transformation: Sal and Lena adopt the Camel’s burdens of duty, Gino and Vinnie charge forward as defiant Lions, and Larry and Octavia reach toward the creative autonomy of the Child. Yet none of the children actualize the Overman’s radical self-creation. Cultural inheritance and the tension between ethnic loyalty and American individualism obstruct their progression. Rather than fulfilling Nietzsche’s teleology, the narrative exposes its limitations. Puzo reframes metamorphosis not as transcendence, but as a cycle of interruption. Through this reconfiguration, the novel foregrounds the fractured subjectivity of second-generation immigrants, who must construct identity amid conflicting imperatives without ever fully reconciling them.