Awakening

The terms "character change" and "epiphany" have been used so long that their concept has become hidden from we who write stories.  Sometimes, we need to look at the terms a new way.  Henri Tracol puts it this way:  Man is born a seeker.  Equipped as he is by nature for vibrating to a vast range of impressions, is he not predestined to an endless wondering?  Bound by necessity to select from these impressions those suitable for conscious assimilation--and thereby to approach a genuine perception of his own identity--is he not singled out for continuous self-interrogation?  Such is his true vocation, his birthright.  He may forget it, deny it, bury it in the depths of his unconscious being; he may go astray, misuse this hidden gift and increase his own alienation from reality; he may even try to convince himself that he has reached, once and for all, the shores of eternal Truth.  No matter; this secret call is still alive, prompting him from within to try, and to try increasingly, to realize the significance of his presence here on earth.  For he is here to awake, to remember and to search, again and still again.

It occurs to me that this is the road we take our characters down.  Some characters embrace the search, others fight it, some awaken, others remain asleep, but they are all trying to realize their significance.  Our stories won't tie up the characters' lives a neat bow because, just like us--the authors-- they are meant to search "again and still again."

When a character has an epiphany, that character becomes awake.  Writes Tracol: Whenever a man awakes, he awakes from the false assumption that he has always been awake, and therefore the master of his thoughts, feelings, and actions.  In that moment, he realizes--and this is the shadow side of recognition--how deeply ignorant he is of himself, how narrowly dependent on the web of relationships by which he exists, how helplessly at the mercy of any suggestion that happens to act upon him at a given moment.  He may also awake--if only for a flash--to the light of a higher consciousness, which will grant him a glimpse of the world of hidden potentialities to which he essentially belongs, help him transcend his own limitations, and open the way to inner transformation.  The choices are limitless, for we all sleep in our worlds of false assumptions. 

Feeling lost, we may even dig ourselves deeper into our comfortable places, like humans in The Matrix.  But the world of safety doesn't last, nor is it meant to.  And we are never so alive as in that moment when we first awaken:  to love, to horror, to recognition, to pain.  That is the moment of epiphany--the experience of being truly alive before we have a chance to lie to ourselves again.  It is the fleeting moment of having the experience of being truly alive.  That's what writers want to capture, I think.  Tracol writes:  Whenever a man awakes and remembers his purpose, he awakes to a fleeting miracle, and at the same time to an unanswerable riddle.  He realizes, at moments, that in order for him to awake he was foredoomed to sleep; in order for him to remember, he was foredoomed to forget. ...If a man were to stay still forever and merge into eternity, there would be little sense in his remaining here on earth.  Such is the human condition.  And it is our task, as writers, to capture the human condition. 

Our characters must be, like ourselves, flawed and must remain flawed.  They are allowed just a fleeting glimpse of what it might be to achieve perfection, or to know their purpose, or to know what life is all about.  That glimpse is epiphany

From Search.  Ed. Jean Sulzberger, 1979