The Undefined Epiphany

“She held her breath, bent over, and looked into the meaningless eyes. But already she knew, even to the convulsive lowering of her hand to the bare chest, even without the violent push she gave the inert torso immediately afterward. As her hands went to her own face, she cried, ‘No!’ once - no more. She stood perfectly still for a long, long time, her head rasied, facing the wall. Nothing moved inside of her; she was conscious of nothing outside or in.” Bowles, pg 230

“These were the first moments of a new existence, a strange one in which she already glimpsed the element of timelessness that would surround her.” Bowles, pg 231

In the Sheltering Sky, when Port dies, leaving Kit in northern Africa, Kit has an epiphany. It’s not perhaps an epiphany in the traditional sense, because how she feels is so very unclear. Kit herself would not be able to put it into words. Someone experiences an epiphany when they suddenly understand something that they didn’t before. This is what happens in the Sheltering Sky. After her realization, she drastically changes her outlook on life.

Kit’s epiphany is hard to define. It is impossible to know what she is thinking in the moment of Port’s death. The path that she takes throughout the rest of the book usually seems completely without reason. In a general way, I think Kit’s epiphany was about the way that she managed her life. Before her epiphany she was settled. Whether or not she enjoyed life, she was able to function and to live as she did, as a drifter. After her epiphany she could no longer function in that existence. Before the epiphany, she had her neurosis: she was terrified of omens and she could hardly hold a conversation with the man she loved. She was very aware of her existence and what went on around her. When this switch happens, at the moment of Port’s death, she is lost to the world. She can only follow and cannot lead.

The epiphany that Kit feels is truly something that cannot be put into words. It’s clear that the epiphany was in response to Port’s death, and that it was negative. It’s almost as if everything before the moment became irrelevant. There was only one thing she knew to do, and that was escape. She wanted to escape from her past existence completely. Why? Because Port was dead, but what else made her so vehemently opposed to her past. Perhaps she felt a lot of guilt for Port’s death. Of couse, her epiphany could have come out of pure fear. Her traveling companion had died and left her in a very foreign country. But if that was the case, she had Tunner to take her back to the US if she wanted to be there. Clearly, she wanted to completely erase her past and start over new. Although why, it’s not quite clear.

In some ways, the epiphany is spiritual. She is reborn completely. It’s as if her body is taken over, completely cleansed of her former life and reborn as something new and innocent. It’s true that she does become like a child, following strange men, looking for someone to take care of her, a father figure or a husband figure. She is always searching for men, wanting men to posess and take care of her. She enjoys being raped and wants Belqassim to be with her always. She is needy. It’s as if someone needs to be with her all the time or she will fall apart. She blindly searches for someone who can hold her together, no matter what the cost. She is uncabable of seeing the dangers that the people she is with present.

The strange thing is that she is in a foreign country, where she had previously understood the culture. After the epiphany, she has lost her understanding of the country. She immerses herself entirely into the culture, even becoming part of a harem. Its amusing because in some ways she becomes the ultimate traveler: just like Kurtz she erases her society and joins a new one. Kit’s epiphany will never be easily explained. It is a complicated emotional change that comes from Ports death. What exactly she feels after the epiphany, and what her motives are for wandering around in the desert attaching herself to strange men are not clear in the book, so we can only speculate.