Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
The shopgirl is unhelpful and resents his presence.
The narrator discovers something fundamental about the world, and his whole viewpoint changes.
I wrote epiphany on the page and circled it.
I thought about Araby as I watchedthe penultimate episode ofI May Destroy You.
She vacillates between denying that her assault was serious and finding power in declaring what happened to her.
She cannot decide, because both visions appeal to her and she just doesnt know.
Its almost totally evaded her since, though.
She starts disintegrating again.
None of it works.
In episode 11, something shifts.
He gives her a handout a printed sheet of paper with a diagram on it.
Its a narrative structure, rendered in a three-part visual form and labeled with story elements.
The beginning, Zain explains, is the setup, where you introduce the regularity of their world.
you might also use multiple narratives, circular structures … its just a guideline, he tells her.
Its her book, roughly, the collected scenes and ideas shes been trying to pull together.
Theyve resisted her, in the same way any coherent, stable perspective on her assault has resisted her.
Zain leaves, and Arabella stands looking at the story thats been revealed to her.
Now, though, they are in order.
Its an epiphanic episode.
She has access to a different understanding of herself.
Thats the moment of new knowledge, after all.
But the true epiphany happens before that.
Her epiphany is structural.
Arabellas memory of what happened to her isnt the episodes epiphany.
I always hated Araby, actually.
But she can find a way forward by taking control of the way she tells herself this story.
They are integrated together.
