Gilgamesh and the Power of Narration‪.‬

Narratives, whether oral stories or forms of historiography and fiction, display ways to make sense of the world and of human experience. (1) Fiction, more specifically, offers the possibility to explore and test alternative values and courses of conduct through the representation of hypothetical yet concrete cases. This paper rises to the challenge of reading the Gilgamesh epic through contemporary "models" for narrative analysis. Obviously, this is a risky undertaking. As Gadamer observed, there is no hermeneutic process that can enable one to jump over one's "prior understanding" (Vorverstandnis), or sometimes, one's lack of it. In this case, I must confess complete ignorance as to the literary genres and devices familiar to readers contemporary to the Gilgamesh epos during its long Wirkungsgeschichte. So this paper will not claim any knowledge about the actual narrative structure of the epic, about the way it was received, or about the role it played in the successive cultural contexts which saw its matiere develop and settle. I can only present an undoubtedly anachronistic analysis of the structures of meaning I read into this "text," thanks to (among others) Foster's and Vanstiphout's compelling translations and editions. (2)