The satire of the anti-prophet:
irony in Jonah’s narrative
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.23925/2236-9937.2021v24p549-582Keywords:
Jonah, irony, satireAbstract
The book of Jonah has been widely known as a literary masterpiece. Over the last decades, scholars have explored narrative features of the book as a whole emphasizing its form and content. However, among these literary analyses, few have mentioned a key phenomenon to comprehend the book: the presence of irony. In the book o Jonah, irony is a key to disclose the multiple levels of interconnection between the various parts of the book. Essential to the characterization, it plays with the reader’s expectations; all characters act opposed to the expected. Irony is also related with point of view; the narrator explores it through the words he puts into the mouth of the characters. Finally there is irony in the way these words echo other texts form the canon; the king of Nineveh’s speech, for example, reproduce the words of Moses in Ex. 32 and 34. Through a narrative criticism analysis, this article aims to explore how irony operates making this book the satire of a anti-prophet.
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