Narrative in Martin Luther King's I've been to the mountaintop

Abstract

Martin Luther King's I've Been to the Mountaintop oration is examined as a significant instance of the rhetorical use of existing narrative as an inventional and argumentative strategy. The narrative functions both as a redescription of situation and as an example for political action. These functions correspond to formal characteristics of narrative form, and suggest that such narratives simultaneously display elements of both metaphor and illustrative parallel.