For and Against Epiphany

[Walter Cummins]

Joyce’s Dubliners after the collection’s publication in 1914 established the model of what a short story should be for decades.

A protagonist behaves with a misguided notion about the situation he or she confronts but finally has an illumination that exposes the error and achieves an authentic understanding. Epiphanies occur throughout the collection, but the opening story, “Araby,” usually serves as the ideal prototype as it was taught in thousands of classrooms. A young boy fixated on a friend’s sister seeks to go to what is billed as an exotic oriental fair to bring back a gift for the girl. He encounters frustrations and delays, not arriving at the fair until it is closing to realize that it is just a sham and that he has been deluded. The story concludes: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” 

Not all epiphanies are so self-mortifying, but they share the conclusion of a central character experiencing a fundamental insight. Thousands of fledging story writers took that as an absolute, the one right way to conceive of a story plot, imaging a situation of essential misunderstanding that is finally exposed, often with a shock of recognition. In effect, the story serves as a learning experience for the protagonist.

Many of the major works of literature involve significant discoveries, including Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, Pip in Great Expectations, Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Huck in Huck Finn, and on and on. In a play or novel, the personal revelations are often multiple, steps building to the big climactic realization, while a short story almost always is limited to one crucial grasping that serves as the resolution of the plot. The character in many ways becomes a different person, usually more authentic.

Such a progression seems a natural for a story plot, a shift from the darkness of misapprehending to the light of insight. Mysteries start with dense unknowns and end with clear solutions. Romances—from Shakespeare and Jane Austen as well as pop fiction—move from people out of touch with their actual emotions to the admissions of love. But the character’s epiphany doesn’t have to assure a solution or a happy ending, just a grasp of what’s really going on. It can even reveal a disturbing truth and often does.

Story epiphanies rely on the dramatic enlightenment of a major character. But an effective short story can be based on very different premises, alternative paths to an impact that may occur apart from the goal of a character’s illumination. 

It took a 1997 essay by Charles Baxter called "Against Epiphanies" to counter the dominance of the epiphany story in the 20^th century after Joyce. He argued that such stories mimicked the idealistic emphasis on self-help and personal improvement in American culture. He also noted the frequency of false realizations that deceive people in real life. Some writers reacted to the essay as blasphemy, but it led many other writers to consider the limitations of epiphany stories and their formulaic inclination, opting to find other ways to tell a story.

One basic approach was to consider who was having the illumination. An obvious answer was that it didn’t have to be a character in the story. Characters could be left to wallow in uncertainly and confusion while the revelation could take place in the mind of the reader, who would be the one to finally grasp what the story situation was all about.

Consider a story that probably has been read and taught as much as Joyce’s “Araby”—Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” In the Joyce story, it’s obvious that the boy’s goal is to go to the fair and acquire a gift. In the Hemingway, set in an isolated Spanish rail station, all that’s overtly presented is the conversation of an unnamed man and woman and their actions in and around the station. The story never explains where they are headed and why. That’s all between the lines. Instead of offering an explanatory climax, the story just seems to stop:

… He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him. 

“Do you feel better?” he asked.
“I feel fine,” she said. “There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.” 

On the surface the story portrays a snippet of the interaction of two people. But any adept reader would get that she is not fine and many would decipher the reason why. Getting what the story is really all about would be the reader’s epiphany.