Presenter(s): Lida Ford
Faculty Mentor(s): Angela Bogart-Montieth
Oral Session 2 DL
An ending can make or break a story. In the modern tradition, most stories end with an epiphany, whereby the main character of the story comes to a great philosophical understanding or discovery. More recently, however, and in the non-western tradition, the epiphany ending is being reconsidered. Charles Baxter, in his article “Against Epiphanies,” calls for a complete overhaul of the epiphany ending, in favor of more complicated and less predictable options. While Baxter certainly makes a valid point, he fails to notice the prevalence of non-epiphany, or reimagined epiphany endings already occurring outside of an English-based canon. In this paper, I explore the work of Spanish-language writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who reinvents epiphanies in numerous ways in his short stories. Marquez uses three techniques that I will highlight in this inquiry: the “ubiquitous epiphany” that allows the reader satisfaction at the end, and presents a larger social moral in the story, the “subverted epiphany” that presents the reader with an idea of how the story functions and then subverts that idea, and the “anticlimactic-epiphany,” where the story is structured to lead the reader to expect an epiphany, and then does not present one. These innovative techniques have not only led to Marquez’s acclaim as an author but give writers from the English-based tradition inspiration in their own work.