Redaction: At this point, Nephi includes an embedded speech in his narrative. This not an unusual feature of Nephi’s writing. He had also quoted his speech exhorting the brothers to get the plates from Laban (1 Ne. 3:15–20). Jacob uses this technique as well in the small plates and, naturally, Mormon uses it extensively as he edits his sources to create the large plates.
Stylistically, Nephi’s narrative describes the “action” of the family exodus, and then adds a specific quotation from those events, which he presents as his actual words. Whether written down closer to the time, as in a personal journal, or remembered much later when he was creating his small plates, we do not know. Regardless of whether Nephi had, indeed, spoken these exact words, he clearly communicated his speech’s intent and effect.
Nephi begins with one source of his brothers’ smoldering resentment: that, being older, they should be setting the example rather than being corrected by their younger brother. Perhaps such a blunt opening doomed Nephi’s speech from the beginning. Or perhaps, it simply brought the issue into the open. From the speech’s result, however, it had the effect of opening wounds rather than closing them.