Epiphany Presentation

Epiphany
Originally had religious connotations:
-Feast of the Epiphany (January 6) when the Magi came to visit infant Christ.
-Revelations by God to mortal men.
Redefined by James Joyce in 1916:
-Joyce applied the religious idea to secular situations
-From Novel Stephan Hero, part of the first draft of A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man.
“This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together into a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase in the mind itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany… Imagine my glimpses of that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment of focus is reached the object is epiphanized.”
(Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory)
or the less wordy version:
“…when a character suddenly experiences a deep realization about himself or herself; a truth, which is grasped in an ordinary rather than a melodramatic moment.” (http://classweb.gmu.edu/sweaver1/narrterms.htm)
-Epiphany is the moment of revelation to a character that changes the way he or she looks at the situation he/she is in or the world as a whole.
-Also known as a “moment of clarity”
Epiphany is Essential to Character Development
-Once a moment of epiphany is reached a character cannot go completely back.
-The plot and the actions of a character should drive an epiphany
-There can be more than One Epiphany in a Novel
-Can take place at any point in a novel
“As Gregor Samsa awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”
-The (poorly translated) Metamorphosis
“It was funny how calm he was. He was quiet just like a storekeeper taking spring inventory and saying to himself ‘I see. I have no better out that down in the order book.’ He had no legs and no arms and no eyes and no ears and no nose and no mouth and no tongue. What a hell of a dream…But it wasn’t a dream…He was nothing but a chunk of meat… ”
-Johnny Got His Gun

“Once a man has changed the relationship between himself and his environment, he cannot return to the blissful ignorance he left. Motion, of necessity, involves a change in perspective”
-Alpha Centauri