Epiphany in Short Stories

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Discuss the Effect of Epiphany in Two Stories from Criss-Cross Tales: a Contrastive and Comparative Approach Epiphany can leave one forever scarred as readily as forever happily enlightened. Comparing and contrasting, we see both extremes of epiphanic effect in both stories: Ray Bradbury’s 1950 ‘-and the Moon Be Still as Bright’ and Edgardo Vega Yunqué‘s 1991 ‘The Kite’. Bradbury’s allegorical story utilizes the effect of epiphany to allude to issues of genocide, particularly the historical episode of annihilation suffered by native Americans as the ‘white man’ pushed the frontier ever deeper west. Yunqué conversely, writes from the perspective of members of a minority, immigrant group. His story is literal and expouses the issues of individual and family identity across a cultural boundary: parents born in Puerto Rico, the children in the USA and uses epiphany to show that division need not be. Bradbury is essentially concerned with mankind looking towards race, whereas Yunqué’s point of view is looking outwards from one minority race towards mankind. Essentially, epiphany affects Bradbury’s white antihero protagonist Spender and antagonist Wilder, their perspective being that as members of the conquering human majority and experience epiphany through an accumulation of events which act upon their foundation of philosophic appreciation for the Martians (69, 79, 81). Conversely, the essential epiphany in ‘The Kite’ affects Yunqué’s protagonist Rick with the perspective of a member of a lower class ethnic minority, whose epiphanic metamorphosis occurs in one evening through meeting Lolín (209) and the death of her family by fire and its aftermath (213). Spender evokes Byron’s haunting poem, Bradbury’s story borrowing the same title (72) and both eventually become resentful of the culturally nihilistic actions (65), drunkenness (72), mindless
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