Another Testament of Jesus Christ: Mormon’s Poetics

The Book of Mormon is clearly a didactic text, with its narrators using plainness, explicitness, and repetition to keep the message clear and straightforward. However, Hardy offers a more in-depth analysis of the text’s rhetorical design that also reveals it as a literary text. The Book of Mormon is both a primer for judgment and a guidebook for sanctification. Parallel narratives are compared through clusters of similar narrative elements or phrasal borrowing between the multiple accounts. In Mosiah, Mormon tells the story of the bondage and delivery of Alma and his people after recounting the story of the bondage of the people of Limhi. Hardy explains that ambiguity, indirection, comparison, and allusions are all used to suggest the larger context of these two narratives. The ability to read the book as a guidebook for sanctification, rather than just as a straightforward didactic primer, will provide insight and guidance in the process of living a faithful life.