ENGL 4310

After reading the three selections on epiphanies, a question comes to mind: Should an epiphany come out of nowhere, or should the entire story lead up to it?

"Araby" by James Joyce and "A&P" by John Updike both seemed to come from nowhere. The boy has been shopping for a gift and then suddenly decides he doesn't need one because he is vain. He didn't have a single inkling of this fact before, nor did the reader (at least, I didn't. Obviously it is vain to want to impress a girl he likes, but it's so common that it doesn't seem to phase me). And In "A&P" the guy suddenly decides to quit, just because. If he was doing it to impress the girls, he was pretty stupid because they didn't even notice. Of course, that could have been the epiphany for him. He did something stupid and rash, and got nothing for it.

"The Gift of the Magi" was more predictable, but probably just because I've heard the story before. It had at least hinted that something like that (buying a gift that they no longer needed) was going to happen. Yet I was under the impression that this was the example of the fake epiphany. I admit that this story wasn't very well crafted in terms of the epiphany, but I thought that epiphanies were generally backed up by text, even if you didn't get it at the time. Maybe I didn't read the first two stories carefully enough, but when I was done and knew what the epiphany was....well, I wouldn't have seen it coming if I looked back and read the text again. There simply wasn't any leading up to an epiphany for me.

I liked O'Connor and Porter's epiphanies simply because they did have things that fit into the epiphany when you finally realized what it was. After having the epiphany you look back on the story and say, "Why didn't I see it coming?" But I didn't have this in these stories. I was simply surprised. Am I just biased in thinking that this is the only way an epiphany should be crafted? Did I miss something while reading those stories?