Central to any travel experience are the tandem processes of witnessing and recounting, which work to memorialize linguistically what was inevitably just a set of fleeting events. Travel narratives help us capture more than what we retain through photographs and mementos because they encapsulate the full reception process through which ephemeral moments become lasting personal memories. Chaim Noy’s A narrative community: Voices of Israeli backpackers suggests that travel stories don’t just preserve events; they also construct identities, turning young people into backpackers, individuals into collectives, and tourists into heroes. Backpacking accounts function in much the same way as other everyday performances in that they articulate the subjectivity of the storyteller, define communities, and reveal ideological frameworks.

Using a variety of objects and approaches, Noy’s nine chapters and two intermezzos incorporate ethnographies, discourse analysis, interviews, and diary entries to reveal “the crystal-like quality of the backpackers’ performances, which reflect differently when viewed from different disciplinary perspectives” (ix). By focusing his investigation on 44 Israeli backpackers’ use of quotations and polyphony in storytelling, Noy furthers his central thesis that these narratives are meaningful, constitutive performances that structure the backpackers’ interactions and experiences. As speakers recount their adventures they become active agents and intersubjective models within the emergent and ritualized Israeli tradition of taking a “Great Journey.” The storytellers are constantly negotiating the hegemonic norms of the many communities within which their performances operate.

The first chapter explains the complicated history of backpacking journeys in Israeli culture and defines the notion of performance within the context of this embodied national tradition. Chapter 2 describes backpackers’ multidimensional use of probing questions and persuasive rhetoric in storytelling. Not only does this linguistic register establish the in-group status of experienced travelers but it also functions to increase group solidarity and perpetuate the tourism tradition by enticing and motivating new backpackers. In chapters 3 through 6 Noy demonstrates the creative and reflexive value of quotation in narrative performances and explores the different ways that reported speech can structure relationships between individuals and collectives. For example, in chapter 4 small transcription samples illustrate the social reframing that occurs when individual backpackers make the rhetorical shift from talking about themselves as lone “I” to choral “we.” Noy goes on to distinguish this choral voice from the third-person collective–canonic voice he describes in chapter 6. While the choral voice indexes group cohesion, the collective voice represents an authoritative dominance that transcends the community knowledge embedded in other reported voices. The book’s final chapters consider other meta-discursive elements of choral quotation, such as its relationship to an imagined “Israeli temperament,” prosody, and written texts. Especially insightful is Noy’s analysis of hand-written trail guides that backpackers leave at popular Israeli hotels abroad for future travelers to use and annotate. Ultimately, this project’s unique contribution to narrative studies is evidenced by the author’s closing discussion of the transformative capacity of language. As the backpackers’ discursive register dynamically constitutes their subjectivity, it also defines cultural and spatial Others, turning reported speech into ideologically infused myths that affect cross-cultural interactions.