Narration and Comedy in the Book of Tobit‪.‬

I. The Tragic, the Comic, and the Dull Perhaps because of its status as a biblical work, or its genuinely pious title character, or the suffering and the serious ethical issues that are a part of it, modern readers of the book of Tobit have regularly ignored its essential comedy and its central comic narrative device. By "comedy" I mean the traditional theory of comedy described as a "sense of the ludicrous, the incongruous, some abrupt dissociation of event and expectation"--a view that goes back to Aristotle. (1) In exploring the relation between narration and comedy in Tobit, I will examine some readings and misreadings that suggest comic possibilities, examine the forms of narration in the book, and argue that Tobit is a comic narrator who, although pious, embodies the ludicrous through his limited perspective, a perspective that the third-person narrator and the reader transcend. In this way the narrator and the reader perceive a beneficent and joyous order.