Juhani Epiphany

In any kind of text or performance with a plot had a epiphany. An epiphany is a moment of realization and usually the climax of the story and the peak of its tension, usually results in a paradigm shift in the character but also the reader. In the short stories of Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain, epiphany is used to climax the plot further explore the character.

In the David Lodge chapter called Epiphany, lodge explains the meaning of the word and uses other texts as an example to show how and why they are used. as he said “In modern fiction an epiphany often had the function performed by a decisive action in traditional narrative, providing a climax or resolution to a story or episode” (Lodge, Epiphany). This definition applies to each of the two authors that have been mentioned. I will be discussing one of each of the authors’ works. Who Am I This Time by Kurt Vonnegut, and The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Didn’t Come to Grief and Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog by Mark Twain.

In the short story of Vonnegut, who am I this time is seen as a cliche plot with typical plots, thats if u read it for the plot and the story. This short story is about a couple of actors who are very introverted, but shift once their together. How epiphany is usually used, like how Vonnegut uses it in this short story, the two characters meet and they are both shy and any-social but once they get on stage and they act then see each other out of acting theres a shift. There is a shift in the mentalities of the characters instead of the reader’s understanding and prediction. Many things foreshadowed the Harry and Helene falling in love, so the reader saw it coming but the epiphany here happened with the characters, which was the climax of the story and was the moment thats been being built up from the beginning of the story.

In The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Didn’t Come to Grief and Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog were both short stories by Mark Twain, that had an epiphany for the reader and the characters. in the story of the bad little boy, Jim was a naughty boy who never followed the Sunday school books’ characteristics of children that the church tried to instill in Jim. and for the whole story he’s been doing exactly what the book have been telling boys not to do. In this story the epiphany is that Jim finds out that is safe from all evils that the Sunday school books have promised for disobeyers like him.

In Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog by Mark Twain, the author creates the illusion that the narrator will find the Leonidas Smiley he’s been looking for when he talks to the fat and bald man in the bar, but instead of finding the out who he ended up to be, the man at the bar just continues to talk about a Jim Smiley that he knows, and the epiphany in that is that we will never find out with the help of this man, and that we are just wasting out time. This is the opposite of a climax, its a faked build up to excite the reader than disappoint for comedic purposes.

Citations:

Lodge, David. The art of fiction. Vintage, 2011

Twain, Mark, and Lawrence I. Berkove. The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain. Modern Library, 2004.

Kurt Vonnegut “who am I this time”