Raymond carver's "epiphanic moments"

Style, Fall, 2001 by Gunter Leypoldt

His wife came in to congratulate him after his communion, and when uttering the usual conventional words she added: "You feel better, don't you?" Without looking at her he said "Yes." Her dress, her figure, the expression of her face, the tone of her voice, all revealed the same thing. "This is wrong, it is not as it should be. Alt you have lived for and still live for is falsehood and deception, hiding life and death from you." And as soon as he admitted that thought, his hatred and his agonizing physical suffering again sprang up, and with that suffering a consciousness of the unavoidable, approaching end. (sec. XI)

Within the narrative framework of Tolstoy's story, Ilyich's moment of insight, described with the generic markers of spiritual illumination, functions as the capstone of a linear bildungsroman pattern, a teleological development during which the hero overcomes his initial ignorance and arrives at a point where he can glimpse the reality behind the surfaces of his existence. What constitutes Tolstoy's typically realist narrative strategy is the fact that the reader's sense-making is pulled along with the character's recognition: Ilyich's sudden "revelation" converges with the implied author's viewpoint of things and is presented to the reader as the story's important "insight." (3) This narrative pattern has often been ironized by modernist and postmodernist writers and lambasted by critics for epitomizing the epistemological naivety of realism (see Saltzman, "Epiphany"), but within the American literary tradition, in which various forms of realism have always prevailed, it has remained prominent. (4) Indeed, in the neorealist novels that appeared in the 1980s alongside Carver's work, it is a rather common narrative pattern, one of the more obvious and widely-read examples being Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). (5) This city-novel's main protagonist, Sherman McCoy, resembles a tragicomical yuppie version of Ilyich, developing from a stage of ignorance towards a stage in which, as the narrator puts it, he can see the world with "the eyes of a realist" (593). McCoy's bildungsroman development is triggered by his financial and social undoing rather than by a fatal disease, and his "death" at the end of the novel is a metaphorical one, symbolic of the demise of McCoy's yuppie-persona and of his spiritual rebirth. Yet his epiphanic awakening, in which he recognizes the shallowness of his glamorous world, is told without irony and very much a transferal of Tolstoy's narrative pattern to Wolfe's New Journalist-type of diction:

Never in [McCoy's] life had he seen things, the things of everyday life, more clearly [...]--oh God!--he now noticed the smallest things...the egg-and-dart molding around the cornice on the main floor ... the old bronze shades on the lamps on the check-writing desks in the middle of the lobby ... the spiral fluting on the posts supporting the railing between the lobby and the section where the officers sat ... All so solid! so precise! so orderly! ... and now so specious! such a mockery! ... so worthless, offering no protection at all. (427)