SOURCE: Clark, Miriam Marty. “The Scenic Self in William Trevor's Stories.” Narrative 6, no. 2 (May 1998): 174-87.

In the following essay, Clark considers Trevor's use of epiphanies in his stories and argues that they differ significantly from modernist usage of epiphanies.

To read widely in William Trevor's stories is to enter a number of familiar short story landscapes: the Catholic Ireland of Joyce and O'Connor; the provincial towns of Chekhov and Munro; the dark, inevitable terrain of family; the interior landscapes of childhood and memory. It is also to enter into a familiar story dynamic, one made more evident by Trevor's pervasive thematic concern with truth and lies and their near kin: knowledge and ignorance, blindness and insight, illusion and disillusionment, hiddenness and disclosure.

Over his long career in stories, Trevor employs a full range of disclosive structures. He makes significant use, for example, of the trope Genette calls paralipsis...