ABSTRACT
Nietzsche could hardly warn his reader more clearly than he does here that his writing is never to be taken at its face value, that he is consciously addressing an audience and adopting a particular persona, which will continually vary. Indeed, one of the more puzzling and fascinating characteristics of his work is the very wide range of these ‘masks’ which he adopts and the extraordinary skill with which he will switch from one to another at short notice and even on occasion combine several in one passage. He is thus continually playing a game with the reader, forcing him not only to think about the subject under discussion but also to follow the elusive scent that is being laid and to attempt to discover the ‘real’ Nietzsche underneath the mask.
