An Epiphany is a term in literary criticism for a sudden realization, a flash of recognition, in which someone or something is seen in a new light.

爱尔兰作家詹姆斯·乔伊斯（James Joyce）在《斯蒂芬·赫罗》（Stephen Hero，1904）一书中用“顿悟”一词来形容“最普通物体的灵魂……在我们看来是光芒四射的。物体实现了顿悟。”小说家约瑟夫·康拉德（Joseph Conrad）将顿悟描述为“罕见的觉醒时刻之一”，其中“一切都发生在瞬间”顿悟可以在非小说作品中以及在短篇小说和小说中被唤起。

“顿悟”一词来自希腊语，意为“显现”或“展现”。在基督教教堂，圣诞节十二天（1月6日）后的节日被称为“顿悟”，因为它向智者庆祝神性（基督之子）的出现。

文学顿悟的例子

顿悟是一种常见的讲故事手段，因为一个好故事的一部分是一个成长和变化的角色。当角色最终理解了故事一直试图教给他们的东西时，突然意识到这一点可能意味着一个转折点。在神秘小说的结尾，当敬礼者最终收到最后的线索，使谜题的所有部分都有意义时，它经常被很好地使用。一个好的小说家常常能带领读者在他们的角色中获得这样的顿悟。

凯瑟琳·曼斯菲尔德短篇小说《布里尔小姐》中的顿悟

"In the story of the same name Miss ​B rill discovers such annihilation when her own identity as onlooker and imagined choreographer to the rest of her small world crumbles in the reality of loneliness. The imagined conversations she has with other people become, when overheard in reality, the onset of her destruction. A young couple on her park bench—'the hero and the heroine' of Miss Brill's own fictive drama, 'just arrived from his father's yacht' . . . —are transformed by reality into two young people who cannot accept the aging woman who sits near them. The boy refers to her as 'that stupid old thing at the end' of the bench and openly expresses the very question that Miss Brill has been trying so desperately to avoid through her Sunday charades in the park: 'Why does she come here at all--who wants her?' Miss Brill's epiphany forces her to forgo the usual slice of honeycake at the baker's on her way home, and home, like life, has changed. It is now 'a little dark room . . . like a cupboard.' Both life and home have become suffocating. Miss Brill's loneliness is forced upon her in one transformative moment of acknowledgment of reality."

（卡拉·阿尔维斯，“凯瑟琳·曼斯菲尔德”，《现代英国女作家：从A到Z的指南》，维基·K·贾尼克和德尔伊万·贾尼克主编，格林伍德，2002年）

哈利（兔子）在兔子身上的顿悟，快跑

"They reach the tee, a platform of turf beside a hunchbacked fruit tree offering fists of taut ivory-colored buds. 'Let me go first,' Rabbit says. ''Til you calm down.' His heart is hushed, held in mid-beat, by anger. He doesn't care about anything except getting out of this tangle. He wants it to rain. In avoiding looking at Eccles he looks at the ball, which sits high on the tee and already seems free of the ground. Very simply he brings the clubhead around his shoulder into it. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasn't heard before. His arms force his head up and his ball is hung way out, lunarly pale against the beautiful black blue of storm clouds, his grandfather's color stretched dense across the north. It recedes along a line straight as a ruler-edge. Stricken; sphere, star, speck. It hesitates, and Rabbit thinks it will die, but he's fooled, for the ball makes its hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling. 'That's it!' he cries and, turning to Eccles with a grin of aggrandizement, repeats, 'That's it.'"

（约翰·厄普代克，《兔子，奔跑》，阿尔弗雷德·A·克诺夫，1960年）

"The passage quoted from the first of John Updike's Rabbit novels describes an action in a contest, but it is the intensity of the moment, not its consequences, that [is] important (we never discover whether the hero won that particular hole). . . . "In epiphanies, prose fiction comes closest to the verbal intensity of lyric poetry (most modern lyrics are in fact nothing but epiphanies); so epiphanic description is likely to be rich in figures of speech and sound. Updike is a writer prodigally gifted with the power of metaphoric speech. . . . When Rabbit turns to Eccles and cries triumphantly, 'That's it!' he is answering the minister's question about what is lacking in his marriage. . . . Perhaps in Rabbit's cry of 'That's it!' we also hear an echo of the writer's justifiable satisfaction at having revealed, through language, the radiant soul of a well-struck tee shot."

（大卫·洛奇，《小说的艺术》，维京人，1993年）

对顿悟的批判性观察

分析和讨论作者在小说中使用顿悟的方式是文学评论家的工作。

"The critic's function is to find ways of recognizing and judging the epiphanies of literature which, like those of life itself (Joyce borrowed his use of the term 'epiphany' directly from theology), are partial disclosures or revelations, or 'spiritual matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.'"

（科林·法尔克：《神话、真理和文学：走向真正的后现代主义》，第二版，剑桥大学出版社，1994年）

"The definition Joyce gave of epiphany in Stephen Hero depends on a familiar world of objects of use—a clock one passes every day. The epiphany restores the clock to itself in one act of seeing, of experiencing it for the first time."

（门罗·恩格尔，《文学的使用》，哈佛大学出版社，1973年）