Sacrifice, Consciousness, and Narrative Pronoun Shifts

This chapter presents the topic of the book and clarifies my purpose in reading sacrifice as a theme conjoined with a formal narrative strategy of pronoun shifting. It further serves as an outline of the theoretical background on which I base my analysis, and an explanation of terms used throughout the book. I explore various definitions of sacrifice, from Hubert and Mauss and Jane Harrison to present-day anthropologists. I use Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind (1807) in order to explore the foundations of the phenomenological link between sacrifice and consciousness and follow the development of his tenets into contemporary philosophy and cognitive science, using the work of David Chalmers among others. Finally, I connect sacrifice and consciousness with narrative pronoun shifts and look at the ways in which pronoun shifts have been used in order to describe consciousness in fictional narrative.