Mormon

The book of Mormon, distinct from the volume as a whole that takes its name, is the point in the record where Mormon stops abridging earlier writers at a distance and narrates events he witnessed and, in large part, participated in directly. Mormon identifies himself as a Nephite general placed in command of his people's armies from a young age, and the book describes the escalating wars between Nephites and Lamanites that consume the final generations of Nephite civilization, wars Mormon leads and, in his own account, eventually refuses to lead further once he judges his own people beyond correction.

This shift from abridger to eyewitness participant changes the character of the text noticeably: earlier books in the Book of Mormon read as compiled history spanning centuries, while Mormon reads as a personal, often anguished account of a specific and final catastrophe, written by someone who expects not to survive it and addresses his account directly to future readers rather than only to his own contemporaries.

Mormon also describes his own reluctant return to command after initially refusing to lead an army he judged too wicked to fight for, an unusual moment of an ancient narrator explaining his own change of mind rather than simply reporting events, which gives the book a self-reflective quality largely absent from the earlier, more compressed abridged material.

The book of Mormon narrates the final destruction of Nephite civilization, culminating in a last battle at a hill the text calls Cumorah, where Mormon describes the death of hundreds of thousands and the effective end of his people as an organized society. Latter-day Saint tradition identifies this hill with a location in present day New York state, the same area where Joseph Smith later described recovering the buried plates, though the Book of Mormon text itself gives only the name and does not independently confirm the geography.

Mormon survives the battle only to be killed shortly afterward, and the record passes to his son Moroni, who both closes his father's book with a brief account of Mormon's death and continues the record himself in the books that follow. The book of Mormon is therefore both an ending, of the civilization it describes, and a transition, from one narrator and record keeper to the last one the Book of Mormon will have.

Latter-day Saint tradition holds that Moroni, having survived his father, later buried the completed record in the hill Cumorah himself, the same plates the tradition describes Joseph Smith recovering fourteen centuries afterward, which is how the book of Mormon's ending connects directly to the nineteenth century account of the volume's translation.