Themes of Epiphany in American Literature: Hemingway, Cofer, Hurston, Carver, Faulkner, Kaufman

The theme under which all six of these stories should fall is called Epiphany. In each of these stories either the characters or the reader has an epiphany or revelation that changes the way one thinks about the story. The characters end up feeling differently toward each other, differently about themselves, or the reader ends up feeling differently about the events of the story.

In Hemingway's' "Cat in the Rain," Cofer's "I Fell in Love, or My Hormones Awakened," and Hurston's "Sweat," the characters end up learning incredibly about themselves. In "Cat in the Rain" the character puts into words how unhappy she is. In "I Fell in Love," the character learns a lesson about love that will last a lifetime. In Hurston's "Sweat", the character learns what she is truly capable of. In "Cathedral," both the reader and Robert have an incredible epiphany about blindness and sight.

In "Cat in the Rain," it is assumed that this couple is an average couple on vacation in Europe. However, the cat becomes a symbol for the isolation and loneliness that the woman feels, and therefore, she wants to rescue the cat. She realizes all that she cannot have in life, and so the cat becomes increasingly important. "I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel," she said. "I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her. And I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes" (Hemingway). When she goes off on the rant, she realizes and the reader realizes how truly unhappy she is and that she feels like "a poor kitty in the rain" (Hemingway).

In Cofer's story, the narrator is a young girl who falls in love with the man who owns the supermarket. She uses every excuse to get there and believes that he hasn't ever noticed her. However, when the man appears out of nowhere at a dance and kisses her, she believes this is the beginning of true love. What she does not understand is that love is not that easy. Her epiphany comes with the lines "if love were easy, life would be too simple" (Cofer).

In Hurston's "Sweat," Delia learns what she is capable of. Her husband Sykes beats her and leaves the work in life all to her. She supports him and endures his beating. However, the really can't stand his pet snake. She goes out of character one day to tell him just that. Sykes is surprised by her outburst and later is attacked by this very same snake. Delia knows what is happening and does nothing. "Finally, Delia moves toward the house, and she can hear Sykes' voice rise hopefully as she approaches. Delia is struck by the horror of Sykes' constricting throat and swollen eye. She runs outside to wait for Sykes to die with the realization that Delia has known all along what was happening to her husband" (Hurston). She realizes her own strength of character, if one wants to call it that.

In "Cathedral," a wife is having a blind man come to visit. This blind man has not seen her since she married, even though the two were really close. It appears that the husband and his wife have not had a close relationship, and that the husband is jealous of the way the blind man knows his wife. In a way, the husband himself is blind to many aspects of his wife's character. Robert appears and they eat together and smoke pot. But when the husband begins watching a show about cathedrals, Robert asks what one looks like. They draw one together, hand on top of hand, and mesh so well that the reader can't really tell who the blind man is anymore.

So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now.

Then he said, "I think that's it. I think you got it," he said. "Take a look. What do you think?"

But I had my eyes closed. I thought I'd keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do.

"Well?" he said. "Are you looking?"

My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn't feel like I was inside anything.

"It's really something," I said. (Carver)

This exchange between the two characters shows the epiphany that the husband had about Robert, what it is like to be blind, and how seeing can sometimes be about more than one's eyes.

In the other two stories, it is the reader who seems to have the epiphanies seem to hit the reader more than the characters. In "A Rose for Emily," the greatest epiphany is that Emily killed her suitor and slept beside him in bed every night as evidenced by the hair on the pillow next to his corpse. The townspeople nor the reader did not realize how desperate Emily was to cling to any sense of the past. In Kaufman's "Sunday in the Park," there is supposedly a good family and a bad family, but as the story goes on, it becomes more and more difficult to separate the two. The "good" family first tells their son that he can throw sand because it is a public sandbox. Then the mother's character is shown through the revelation that she has a defenseless child and it bothers her as seen in the next line when she exclaims, "Stop crying. I'm ashamed of you" (Kaufman)! The mother wishes for something different or a different child, which is not the sign of a "good" mom. She is really ashamed of her own husband and son, and that is the reader's revelation.

In each of these stories there comes a point of insight or revelation. Sometimes the revelation is for the character and sometimes it appears to the reader. Sometimes it is based on gender and sometimes not. What is evident is that all of these characters are unhappy at some point in their lives and need to learn something to grow and move on. Some of them have more hope than others. However, they should all be grouped together under a heading of Epiphanies or Revelations.

Works Cited

Carver, Raymond. "Cathedral."

Cofer, Judith Ortiz. "I Fell in Love, or My Hormones Awakened."

Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily."

Hemingway, Ernest. "A Cat in the Rain."

Hurston, Zora Neale, "Sweat."

Kaufman, Bel, "A Sunday in the Park."