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(2012) Literary epiphany in the novel, 1850–1950, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses (1942) presents the epiphany of a nonpassive being: the bear. The bear is purely phenomenal, like Lily's brushstroke, but unlike the brushstroke, it is alive. It moves, watches, and hunts, eluding the men who hunt it and make it an object of their games and tall tales. When Isaac McCaslin sees the bear, the bear looks back. It is a wild animal and thus an authentic Other: sentient but not human, conscious but without a human pattern of thought, unassimilable to human terms except through destruction. The look of this Other plays a decisive role in forming Isaac. More than the boy seeing the bear, Isaac's being seen by the bear makes him the Ike who becomes uncle to half the county while father to no one.
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Kim, S. (2012). The look of the other in the bear, in Literary epiphany in the novel, 1850–1950, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 127-144.
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