Epiphany can be defined as the sudden realization of the essence or meaning of something, as well as the understanding of the truth of certain situations or one’s life as a whole. In Death in Venice, Gustav von Auschenbach’s recognition of his love for and obsession with Tadzio is a kind of epiphany that, while not exactly beneficial or positive marks a point in which the character experience complete clarity and begins to express honesty about his previously rejected desires.

Gustav von Auschenbach, having led a life of dedication to his craft, prides himself on disciplined perfectionism and dignity. His life up to the point at which the novel takes place has been largely uneventful. Many ominous occurrences help to illustrate Gustav’s state of mind at the story’s opening. His exchange with a strange gondola rower who turns out to be a criminal, as well as his sighting of a disturbing old man dressed to look youthful are both v

aguely perilous encounters which serve to establish Gustav’s uneasiness. Upon discovering Tadzio, Gustav slowly allows his principles and dignity to erode as his obsession expands. Tadzio seems to tap into the lifelong desires that Gustav has repressed in the interest of being fully committed to his work. The end result of this obsession, however, is the writer’s death.

While not necessarily in the dark before this epiphany, von Auschenbach was certainly very repressed. After feeling a vague need for a vacation, he travels to Venice completely unaware of what waits for him. The obsession is something that, given his principles, is extremely hard to verbalize. However, when he finally declares, “I love you,” it is clear that he has accepted the truth about his feelings and desires. Though neither overtly religious or spiritual, von Auschenbach’s epiphany marks a change in his profound change in his state of mind and worldview and could therefore be seen as spiritual. This epiphany was solely brought on by the travel experience, before which von Auschenbach had lived a stable and principled life. His deeply ingrained longings were awakened through his trip to Venice and his sighting of Tadzio. While von Auschenbach’s Venetian experience led him to a greater freedom and honesty, which is not to be ignored, his travels ultimately resulted in his mental torture and death.

Epiphany is not always positive, as indicated by Death in Venice. Discovery, especially self-discovery, can be quite painful and sometimes thoroughly detrimental. Gustav von Auschenbach, having lived a monotonous and increasingly stagnant life was unable to process the hard truths of his dangerous desires, considering them foreign, unpleasant, and sinful; his inability to ever speak or reach out to Tadzio being proof of this. While it was certainly a moment of complete honesty, von Auschenbach’s revelation and declaration of his love led him to further introversion. The downward spiral that began with the first time he laid eyes on the young boy grew from a preoccupation to a complete obsession leaving him unable to focus on anything else and changing his worldview and philosophy to suit his festering desires. This epiphany of his uncontrollable lust led to his bizarre death but allowed him to gain a deeper knowledge of himself.

tourist information, more important than you may think

While many of the novels we read had elements of epiphany, there were a few that stood out the most. I think that the epiphany in Sputnik Sweetheart is perhaps the most unique epiphany that we read about. When Sumire realizes that in order to be happy with Miu, she has to seek out a part of Miu that no longer exists in their current reality. In many ways this relates directly to why most people travel in the first place. In many cases, travel is a tool for discovering another part of or way of life that is not evident in one’s everyday life. People travel to escape the banality of the day-to-day, and they go searching for something more. In Comfort of Strangers for example, Colin and Mary go to Italy to search for a new strength that will help them improve their relationship. They too, embark into an alternate type of reality, a reality parallel to their own that is only accessible to them because they are traveling.

The realization that Sumire comes to is life altering, not only for Sumire, but for Miu and the narrator as well. By seeking out something completely different and leaving behind everything she knows, Sumire leaves the people she cares about in the dark. They are greatly affected by her departure and go to great lengths trying to find her. The question is, was Sumire’s epiphany a good thing or a bad thing? Because we don’t follow Sumire on her journey, we aren’t really aware if she found what she was looking for, but we do see the damage her disappearance does in the lives of Miu and especially the narrator.

In The Comfort of Strangers, Colin and Mary experienced a moment that seems to help them realize a goal of their trip. Much of this class has been based around the idea of finding the authentic experience through travel. While in the bar with Robert, Colin and Mary “began to experience the pleasure, unique to tourists, of finding themselves in a place without tourists, of making a discovery, finding somewhere real…they in turn asked the serious, intent questions of tourists gratified to be talking at last to an authentic citizen.” (McEwan, 29) They manage to find a small sliver of authenticity amid the normal tourist culture, and while this is important in the story, what comes of this discovery is perhaps more pertinent. Later in the story, the couple realizes that their authentic encounter with Robert has actually caused a great detriment to their ability to completely enjoy their trip. They spent so much time searching for something authentic that once they found it failed to notice how dangerous it could be. The epiphany here lies in the idea that while authentic experiences are welcome, it is important to realize that the safety and familiarity of tourist experiences are indispensably valuable.

Dictionary

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary by Xiaolu Guo suggests a kind of epiphany very different from what an epiphany is traditionally thought to be. The Oxford English Dictionary defines epiphany as “a manifestation or appearance of some divine or superhuman being,” and this is typical: a religious experience. But Xiaolu Guo makes the idea of an epiphany a very ordinary, everyday experience, without removing the sacred from it. In the novel Zhuang is living in a foreign country, learning about both the culture she is trying to become a part of and about love. The book is set up as both a dictionary and a journal. Each entry is a new word: it contains the definition, provided by a dictionary, and her experiences of the word. Each new word, and each new entry, is a kind of epiphany. She is not just learning words but she is learning what they mean, and how their meaning affects her life. In learning these new words and their meanings she is learning the difference between her culture at home in China and the Western culture.

One entry is entitled “Future Tense,” and in it she discusses Love, as a Chinese concept and as a Western concept:

‘Love,” this English word: like other English words it has tense. ‘Loved’ or ‘will love’ or ‘have loved.’ All these specific tenses mean Love is a time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.

If our loved existed in Chinese tense, then it will last for ever. It will be infinite.

She explains that Chinese does not have past, present, or future tenses. Everything is in one tense: this makes learning English very difficult because the Chinese speaker must learn that things exist “in a particulr period of time:” she must learn this about love as well, but not in the abstract way in which she learns is school. She is not learning about love from a teacher in a classroom, but from a lover in the world. She must learn as she experiences.

Every new experience she has and every new word she learns is an epiphany. Even though these epiphanies become commonplace, I think they are sacred experiences, if not in a religious sense. Love is a sacred thing, and so is everything else that she learns about. Everything she learns is taken for granted by those who already know it, but for her each word is something completely new, and her joy in learning words is expressed to other people.

Several days and at least 3 or 4 drafts later, I'm still struggling to communicate my ideas.

I was quite interested in the "inexpressibility topos". Hence the struggle. I actually picked up a book about Montale by Clodagh Brook that specifically tackles the inexpressibility topos in Montale's work. While much of it was irrelevant, it developed a useful history of the idea (Dante through the Modernists), which I found quite illuminating.

There is certainly more than one connection to be made with Sputnik Sweetheart, but a few stood out:

(1) Brook highlights the significance of WWI for the Modernists - “One of the primary theories to emerge is that a world which had undergone such radical transformations in those years needed a concomitant upheaval in its means of expression” (Brook 6). I wonder if the same might be said of the impact of the Tokyo gas attacks on Murakami. On reading Underground, I found a number of places in which he questions his own capacity to represent the realities of the individuals he interviewed. He was especially struck by an interview with Ms. "Shizuko Akashi", who, as a result of the sarin attack, lost both her memory and ability to speak. When faced with the necessity to speak for her, he questioned "just how vividly could [his] choice of words convey to the reader the various emotions (fear, despair, loneliness, anger, numbness, alienation, confusion, hope…) these people had experienced” (236). This problem takes on even greater meaning in the second section of his book when Murakami suggests that terrorism and perhaps violence in general is the manifestation of a need for self-expression that exceeds the capacity of words and language.

Given the timing of Sputnik Sweetheart's publication, it seems likely that many of the themes and issues that the Tokyo gas attack provoked for Murakami were still reverberating as he penned his novel.

(2) Having already strayed off the path of a formalist reading of the novel, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to imagine Sumire as a kindred spirit to Murakami. She seems to share his uncertainty about the capacity of her prose. By her own account, her writing is lacking something essential. “Problem is, once I sit at my desk and put all these down on paper, I realize something vital is missing. It doesn’t crystallize – no crystals, just pebbles.” In response, K recounts the story of the Chinese gates built with the bones of soldiers who had died in war. “When the gate was finished they’d bring several dogs over to it, slit their throats, and sprinkle their blood on the gate.” The ritual was thought to revive the soldiers’ souls and complete the gate. Although Murakami returns several more times to the baptismal blood bath, its meaning is never revealed. Through his use of metaphor, Murakami extends the practice of elevating the ineffable. The very thing that would make Sumire's writing complete and perhaps, because of her sense of the inextricable link between her idea of self and her capacity to express, would Sumire herself whole is "some form of truth harboured beyond the word" (Brook 1).

(3) All of these themes come to a head with Sumire’s last words, so to speak. Sumire’s epiphany at the end of the document that K reads on her computer is simultaneously revelatory and dissatisfying for the reader. It on the one hand offers an acknowledgment of the coexistence of two worlds and hints at an explanation for Sumire’s disappearance (which would be an epiphany for the reader) and on the other hand denies the reader closure by ending with an unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question.

“I’m in love with Miu. With the Miu on this side, needless to say. But I also love the Miu on the other side just as much. The moment this thought struck me it was like I could hear – with an audible creak – myself splitting in two. As if Miu’s own split became a rupture that had taken hold of me.

One question remains, however. If this side, where Miu is, is not the real world – if this side is actually the other side – what about me, the person who shares the same temporal and spatial plane with her?

Who in the world am I?”

There is an incapacity of language to answer the question of her own reality. The novel is ultimately just an ellipsis, a sort of meta-aposiopesis, “pointing towards it without voicing it” (Brook 11).

In Underground, Murakami writes, “Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you’re no longer talking about reality” (363). This is undoubtedly what we encounter in the novel. Each effort to pin down some truth about the characters (K’s evasion of self-description, Miu’s trauma, and indeed Sumire’s disappearance), leads further away from reality. Words become increasingly inadequate to express the multiplicity of selves each character ostensibly represents. As Murakami concludes in Underground, “The mountains are not mountains anymore; the sun is not the sun.”

In The Sheltering Sky, Kit could be said to have an epiphany towards the end of the novel. After Port’s death Kit just wanders off until she comes across a pool and gets in. Kit’s bath in the pool is a religious type of experience, a sort of baptism. “She felt a strange intensity being born within her. As she looked about the quiet garden she had the impression that for the first time since her childhood she was seeing objects clearly. Life was suddenly there, she was in it, not looking through the window at it….As she immersed herself completely, the thought came to her: “I shall never be hysterical again,”” (Bowles 241). She lets go of her fatalistic ideas and decides to be in control of her own destiny. However, this experience of realization also seems to be about something else not quite describable. This epiphany seems to be about a shift in Kit’s view of life. After the bath she describes how she had always felt being unhappy was “a natural condition of life,” (Bowles 242) but had now found the joy of living.

Before this epiphany, Kit is unhappy and worrying and felt that she had no control over own life. She felt that “all she could hope to do was eat, sleep and cringe before her omens,” (Bowles 120). But after she emerges from the pool and goes into the desert she has a complete change of mindset - “instead of feeling the omens, she would now make them, be them herself,” (Bowles 263).

Kit’s realization probably occurred because of Port’s death. After his death when she is lying on the floor and she thinks that “these were the first few moments of a new existence,” (Bowles 230). The epiphany then inspires travel as she walks into the desert. She comes across a procession and goes with them. As she spends more time travelling across the desert with the natives, she lives in the moment opposed to before when she would worry about the future. “She did only the things she found herself doing,” (Bowles 270). She begins to have a relationship with one of the merchants, Belqassim and eventually lives with him. Then when she is dragged back to civilization she resists. Miss Ferry, the American consulate, finds Kit to look like a “partially Europeanized servant,” (Bowles 309). In the end Kit refuses to return to the civilized European world and stays in the more “uncivilized” world.

The Sun Also Rises “His black hair shone under the electric light. He wore a white linen shirt and the sword-handler finished his sash and stood up and stepped back. Pedro Romero nodded, seeming very far away and dignified when we shook hands. Montoya said something about what great aficionados we were, and that we wanted to wish him luck. Romero listened very seriously. Then he turned to me. He was the best-looking boy I have ever seen.” (Hemingway 167)

Much of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises implies the emasculation of men after World War I. In previous wars, soldiers gained a sense of nobility through fighting; in this war, however, the use of new technology such as artillery shells forced soldiers to huddle together in fear of death, often leaving survival up to chance. This deprived most soldiers their sense of dignity and made them feel like lesser men, for their success in the war had little to do with bravery or physical strength. In the above quote, Jake Barnes is having an epiphany in finally realizing the insecurities about his masculinity by admiring the bullfighter Pedro Romero. Romero, just nineteen years old, is “the best-looking boy [Barnes has] ever seen.” Barnes sees him as a great, passionate aficionado who is able to look death in the eyes through his dangerous sport. He is physically beautiful.

After this realization, Barnes begins to have a sort of obsession with the young bullfighter. Romero forces Barnes to acknowledge his insecurities by so obviously being his foil. While Romero is able to face death, Barnes runs away from even the smallest of discomforts, forcing him to constantly move throughout Europe as to avoid staying in one place long enough to face any hardships. Perhaps most importantly, Brett has an obvious attraction to Romero, which she acts upon. Barnes is in love with Brett, but she refuses to be with him due to his impotency that was caused by an “accident” during the war. This, obviously, compares Romero’s masculinity to Barnes’ lack thereof. Although Barnes never states this directly, his admiration of Romero in the quote above quite clearly implies Barnes’ realization. Barnes has this epiphany because he is the narrator.

In actually, any of the male characters in the story could have had the same realization, because they all struggle with insecurities about their masculinity. Robert Cohn, for example, lets his girlfriend Frances Clyne walk all over him, and has little control whatsoever in their relationship. Bill Gorton, another friend of Barnes, tells him, “I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot” (121). Many passages throughout the novel hint at Gorton’s possible homosexuality, once again lessening his sense of masculinity. To further show the men’s weakness and unmanliness, Hemingway created his female character Brett to be more masculine than most of the men, particularly Barnes. She has short, boyish hair, often wears men’s hats, and can hold her liquor like a man. All of these components of the novel hint at the war’s emasculating of soldiers, an issue that Barnes does not acknowledge until he is in the presence of Romero. Through his epiphany regarding his lack of manliness, Barnes perhaps realizes what forces him to travel as much as he and his friends do. In order to avoid thinking about the war and what it has done to their masculinity (for example making Barnes impotent), the characters simply move from place to place and drink absurd amounts of alcohol. One can infer that at this moment, Barnes is realizing the emptiness of his traveling, and perhaps the fact that he uses it as a self-defense mechanism.

“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.

Klimt's Tree of Life

When I was little, my parents used to ask me and my sister every night at dinner to name three things we learned that day. It seemed tedious to a child - what did we learn? Sometimes we could ramble on about new French words or multiplication tables, but other days we were completely at a loss. But this exercise should have been easy. The reality is, we were learning so much every single day. We all do, each day, even if we don't always stop to realize it. In fact, the daily insights we have are really important, be them sweeping moments of falling in love or as simple as learning what "homosexual" means. The point is, it's all important, and we should never overlook the smaller moments of spiritual progression.

In this light, we can look to Xiaolu Guo's A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary as a series of epiphanies that amalgamates into one, large epiphany. As a dictionary that Guo's main character, Z, creates, each short chapter is titled by an English word, one that Z has either added to her English vocabulary or has expanded her understanding of during the course of her daily events. Though it would be fruitful to focus on specific epiphanies Z has throughout the book, such as her first time masturbating, or the myriad cultural connections and dissonances she discovers, if we look holistically at the novel as one great, united epiphany, we can see that Guo's greatest accomplishment is compiling the seemingly ordinary moments of change and realization into a larger chronicle of progression. Z's most meaningful epiphany is her realization that her own Concise Chinese-English dictionary, her diary, is the one that brings her to a new spiritual place. This entire section of her life, which fits neatly into book form, marks a moment of realization and the shaking of previous boundaries to bring Z into a new understanding.

The burdens of consciousness Z carries with her she releases via writing, by sharing her private realizations with us. In doing so, her overall commitment to writing in English not only brings her to a better understanding of English and general Western culture, but the entirety of it is a finished epiphany; one giant realization of her growth and maturation. And it very well may be that Z's choice to share this diary with us, the reader, is in a way its own epiphany: the realization that what she has accomplished is truly something. Her experiences, her new knowledge, her entire voyage was the work of change and spiritual balance. She had extreme highs and extreme lows, fell in love and found her own body; she became a woman, had her womanhood taken from her, and regained it back with her strength and conviction. Knowing all of this, she speaks to us so we can read each entry as a small, but vital change and perhaps reflect on our own daily epiphanies. What did we learn today?

As a travel fiction, Z's novel stands a picture of both a figurative and literal journey, one that ends with a return home. When she left, she was still a girl, and she returns a woman, who has the maturity and peace of mind to be able to share her writing, instead of her body, with us for our benefit. She has learned to respect herself, and she respects her voyage as a whole, the pieces of which she puts together to make sense of a confusing, often difficult and beautiful life. And life itself is, of course, a journey.

a vicious animal, ready to strikeEpiphany seems to be an important aspect of travel for many people, even if not in the context of a novel. Epiphany is generally a word used with a positive connotation. By traveling, many of us try to learn new things and reach new levels of existence, whether through an epiphany or simply by relaxing. Sometimes, though, epiphany can sneak up on us when we least expect it, as it does for K in Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami. After hearing from Miu that Sumire, his object of desire, went missing in Greece K heads to Greece to help search for her. The news and the trip caught him off guard having come up all of a sudden. This trip leads to him meeting Miu, learning all about their relationship and about them as people.

In the process, K even has an epiphany of his own which he may or may not have expected or been looking for. After reading documents one and two, he comes to the conclusion that Sumire must have gone to the “other side” (165). He then narrates his thoughts about a memory that Sumire had written: “So what should we do to avoid a collision? Logically, it’s easy. The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams, and never coming out. Living there for the rest of time” (166). The narrator writes about the night after he read these documents that Sumire had left as he begins to ponder these ideas of “dreams.” He wonders about how to get to this “world of dreams” and he writes about the difficulty of putting it into words. After making dinner for himself, K listens to a couple of Mozart cassettes from Sumire’s room before, at some point, drifing off to sleep only to be woken up again (possibly within the dream world) by music being sung in Greek. K makes his way out into the summer night in search of the source of the music when he began to feel a sense to being swept into a different world. He tells us:

I stopped and turned to look behind me. The slope twisted palely down toward the town like the tracks of some gigantic insect. I looked up at the sky then, under the moonlight and glanced at my palm. With a rush of understanding I knew this wasn’t my hand anymore. I can’t explain it. But at a glance I knew. My hand was no longer my hand, my legs no longer my legs (170).

It is at this point that K begins to his epiphany. He seems to leave his physical body behind, entering a separate world. The setting is perfect for him to experience an epiphany. By going into nature, he is setting forth on the biggest journey of the trip. In addition, the words “rush or understanding” have a very epiphany-related meaning. Something about his experience in Greece leads him to the end of a road, some sort of completion that allowed him to enter this world. Be it the reading of the documents of the walk outside in search of music, he has channeled into the spirit of Sumire. What he describes appears to be a kind of religious experience. He continues to say:

Time reversed itself, looped back, collapsed, reordered itself. The world stretched out endlessly—and yet was defined and limited. Sharp images—just the images alone—passed down dark corridors, like jellyfish, like souls adrift. But I steeled myself not to look at them (170).

Time goes by as K continues to search for the source of the music he has been hearing to no avail. Sumire is not to be found. The more time passes the more he tries to convince himself it was a dream or “illusion”. He tries to convince himself that it never happened or that maybe it had been “meticulously planned”. After making it back to the cottage, K has a lot of trouble trying to fall asleep (probably because of something that resonated inside him from his epiphany). His experience ends with a vision he has of cats slowly devouring him. “If I listened carefully, somewhere far far away I could hear the cats lapping up my brain” (172). The cat symbolism really brings together this Murakami landscape. It really shows us K’s despair over having lost Sumire. And, ultimately, it is this knowledge that he takes from the epiphany. The next chapter begins: “In the end, we never found out what happened to Sumire” (173).

Epiphany Essay

“Love is patient, love is kind...” (1 Corinthians 13:4) This quote definitely does not hold true in literature. Take Romeo and Juliet for example. Their messy family histories lead to an untimely death for both of the title characters. It is unfair that the two who loved needed to die in order for the families to reconcile their differences. Does this sound right? Can we really accept that in order for people to realize something, major events—such as death—need take place?

Love is always paired with a moment of epiphany. The person realizes that they cannot, any longer, deny the feelings they harbor for another. An epiphany of love can take place either as an enlightenment of one of the characters, realizing that they do in fact feel something for another, or it could be the opposite, realizing that they had been fooling themselves by thinking that they ever loved this person. The moment of epiphany for Daisy Miller, Henry James’s title character in his short novel Daisy Miller, occurs too late, and the young Miss Miller—blinded by love—throws caution to the wind, and dies. However, this is not the only epiphany in the story. Winterbourne, the very sophisticated and image-conscious American-gone-European, has a different sort of epiphany of love, and leaves Daisy out to dry.

A debate that endures throughout the novel by many characters is on the subject of Daisy’s innocence. She is an American, traveling through Europe accompanied by her mother and younger brother, Randolph. Throughout the novel, Daisy is described as a flirt. It is viewed as a negative trait, commented on and gossiped about by many of the has-been American socialites. She has many male friends, and it is up for debate until the very end as to whether or not these men are more than friends. While in Geneva, Daisy meets Winterbourne. Sophisticated and mature as he may be, he is still taken by her. They spend time together, and it is apparent that Winterbourne has feelings for Daisy. Although his love is not revealed to him in an epiphany manner, it still inspires Winterbourne’s travel. He follows Daisy, after a brief hiatus, to Rome.

At this point of the story, Winterbourne’s romantic feelings are one-sided. Daisy does not reciprocate. In fact, she does the opposite. She finds a new love interest, Giovanelli. They attend parties together and are seen in public together, drawing much attention to themselves. If it occurs to Daisy that Winterbourne has feelings for her, she does not let on about it. While Winterbourne is wandering around one night, he stumbles upon the Colosseum. There, he enjoys the beautiful sight, but not before he is interrupted with the realization that he is not alone. Daisy and Giovanelli are also there, and he becomes outraged. Probably out of jealousy, he lashes out at Giovanelli, telling him that he should know better than to take Daisy here at night, with the Roman Fever around. This is where the double epiphany is realized.

In the time that Daisy and Winterbourne have alone, she tells him that she does not care about catching the Roman Fever. She is succumbing to her feelings at this moment. When in love, people are reckless. Daisy simply wants to be with Winterbourne, not caring about what the dangers around her or view of as correct. Daisy’s epiphany of love comes too late. When she is out that night, she catches the disease. This leads to her untimely death. She does not get to admit her feelings to Winterbourne, although it is quite apparent by her actions. Love makes people do the craziest things. All they want is the attention and affection of another, and poor Daisy was not an exception. Daisy realized all of the time she had wasted playing games and vying for the attention of many men, when subconsciously, she knew Winterbourne was right for her.

The episode at the Colosseum also held a moment of epiphany for Winterbourne. He realizes that he does not love Daisy. He describes her as too common. The fact that he does not reciprocate feelings leads Daisy to act carelessly. Winterbourne is so negative in his thoughts about Daisy, in what might be viewed as him trying to convince himself that Daisy is not worth his time. Winterbourne goes to visit Daisy, possibly out of guilt, maybe still out of love, but she is too ill to see him. When Daisy dies, yet another epiphany occurs to Winterbourne. He realizes that Daisy had in fact, been innocent. It is not certain if he allows himself to have proper feelings of love towards her again, even after her death, but it seems that he comes to peace with Daisy through this epiphany. Sometimes, even with the help of an epiphany, people fail to communicate. Love was not patient or kind in Daisy Miller, but looming and tricky. Love was simply just not in the stars for these two.