This work is developed in three stages, in which the contact between Lima Barreto and Nietzsche moves from the contact of the former with the works of the later to what is most profound in the way the two authors build the world, one in the late nineteenth century, the other in the early twentieth century. The writer from Rio de Janeiro, immersed in a vibrant intellectual context in the first decades of the century, had contact with the most important philosophical currents that circulated in Rio de Janeiro at that time. Contact with Nietzsche s works became almost inevitable, as since the late 1890s he had become a phenomenon in the intellectual world, being absorbed by specific literate segments that used his works as a basis for aesthetic and moral renewals. In this context, Lima Barreto rejects Nietzsche s thought as the most vile, bourgeois and contrary to the ideals of solidarity and community that he preached. However, a closer reading allows us to glimpse, behind the public debate, a more intertwined relationship between the way in which the two authors understand existence in a world that seemed to be fragmenting. The repetition in Lima Barreto s notes of the sentence in the prologue of Zarathustra opens up a reading in which the perspective of the construction of the Self – in a literature that walks between the complexity of a world of appearance and the tragic process of dissolution of the subject – points to the critique of idealism and the artistic foundation of a world in the process of becoming, whether in Zarathustra s exhortations or in the wandering of Gonzaga de Sá.