Steve Walker, a faculty member in the Brigham Young University English department, has written several articles on literature and belief. He once wrote an essay called “Last Words,” as an introduction to the books of 4 Nephi, Mormon, Ether and Moroni. This came at the end of a series of essays on different parts of the Book of Mormon. He is a master of literary analysis. This is what he said:
Looked at from a literary perspective, for its impact in our personal lives, I find the final section of the Book of Mormon to be particularly engaging. Like any good climax, it tends to be the most intense part of the book. It is arguably the most significant section. This culmination of a thousand-year chronicle puts the whole volume into over-view mode—the summary at the end of the book encapsulates what has mattered most. T. S. Eliot [“Little Gidding,” The Four Quartets] observed that, ‘What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.’ Endings re-orient us as when Sam from the Lord of the Rings returns to the shrine with all those world-altering adventures involving the ring. ‘Well, I’m back.’
The small books that wrap up the Book of Mormon—Fourth Nephi, Mormon, Ether, and especially Moroni—give us the conclusion to the whole matter. Their endings are emphatic because they take up the theme of endings in a series of death-bed statements, famous last words. That’s dramatic because of the ‘last, the best of all the game’ effect, because of our expectation that the final things said distills overall implications, as in Sidney Carton’s last words in A Tale of Two Cities: ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done.’ The final Book of Mormon words put me in the mind of the last words of Rabelais, for instance, who said: ‘I’m going to seek a great perhaps’; and of Lord Nelson’s, ‘Thank God I have done my duty’; and Goethe, ‘More light’. I especially like Pancho Villa’s expression that final statements matter, ‘Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.’
There is weightiness to the last words in the Book of Mormon as it assumes a death-bed whisper, ‘low out of the dust’ as ‘one that hath a familiar spirit … out of the ground.’ The book’s mood here is solemn, and that ‘whisper out of the dust’ haunts us. It is because we are witnessing the death throes of entire peoples and sense the cosmic proportions in that apocalyptic end of all things. Unlike the apocalypses we’re used to, the kind of arcane theoretical symbolizing we get in Ezekiel or Revelation, this apocalypse invades actual experience. Mormon gives his last words, Moroni makes a penultimate statement, then his final absolute words, and we hear not so much the echo of a distantly anticipated millennial ending as the immediate death of specific individuals.
This is a great literary comment on what we are seeing here in the Book of Mormon.
Steve Walker, “Last Words,” in The Reader’s Book of Mormon: Last Words: 4 Nephi – Moroni, eds. Robert A. Rees and Eugene England (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2008), vii-xxii.