I May Not Get There With You: “I've Been to the Mountaintop” as Epic Discourse

Abstract

This essay forwards epic form as a way to better understand King's last speech,“I've Been to the Mountaintop”It demonstrates the way King uses epic frames to resonate with American and Christian epic narratives and to constitute the civil rights struggle as a new epic, and himself as an epic hero. King uses the epic frame to persuade and to encourage his audience, and to frame his controversial decisions within a wider context. This functions to encourage his audience to persevere and to conceptualize the movement on a grand scale.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Vanessa Beasley, John Murphy, the editor, and anonymous reviewers for their advice in preparing this manuscript.

Notes

A notable exception here is Wenzel (1989) who used a propositional method of analyzing King's arguments to deal with the rhetorical exigencies of the moment and downplayed the narrative.

In the narrative history of Israel, Moses died before reaching the Promised Land; it was his successor Joshua who led the Hebrew people into the Promised Land.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bethany Keeley

Bethany Keeley, PhD student, University of Georgia.