SOURCE: “The Speaking Voice in the Book of Lamentations,” in Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 93, No. 1 March 1974, pp. 41-49.

In the following essay, Lanahan offers a detailed examination of five distinctive narrative personae in Lamentations and explains how their use benefits the work.

This examination of the speaking voice in the Book of Lamentations will not discuss the authorship of the book. The attribution of the work to the prophet Jeremiah is fundamentally a question of historical judgment. The attempt to identify the speaking voice, the subject of our concentration at the moment, is a stylistic concern. In this context, literary criticism sometimes uses the term persona, i.e., the mask or characterization assumed by the poet as the medium through which he perceives and gives expression to his world.

The persona is not to be thought of as a fiction. It is a creative procedure in the...