Abstract
Abstract: The Babylonian Talmud is filled with personal stories about its heroes and their experiences, attitudes, thoughts, and adventures. However, quite surprisingly, these stories are rarely narrated by their protagonists. Rabbinic stories usually conform to the aesthetic norm of using third-person narration, told by another sage or by the sugya’s anonymous narrator. This article examines the poetics of stories in the Babylonian Talmud that deviate from this norm by utilizing an internal first-person narrator and attempts to establish the cultural significance of avoiding this mode of narration. Through identifying the places where the sages make use of first-person narration and examining their qualities, I claim that first-person narration, where one’s own self becomes an object of knowledge and storytelling, is limited to experiences of an individualized esoteric nature, and not of day-to-day life routine, shared, and common life experiences. Furthermore, I argue that within rabbinic culture, only the collective, represented by the third person, can mediate the personal produce valid knowledge and preserve the individual’s conflicts, thoughts, and adventures.
Published Version
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