Dismantling the Literal Patriarchy:

Man-Father-Figure Dynamics in the Epiphanies Trilogy

 

Across the Epiphanies Trilogy—Midnight at the Arcanum, The Ancestral Sea, and Touched by Fortune’s Shadow—the father figure is a persistent axis of both obstruction and transformation. Sometimes biological, sometimes symbolic, sometimes entirely internalized, the paternal presence serves as a crucible in which the protagonists’ ethical, emotional, and narrative identities are forged. This essay examines the evolving dynamics of fatherhood and manhood through the trilogy’s central male characters, focusing on how the absence, confrontation, or transformation of paternal relationships reflects a deeper inquiry into power, authorship, adulthood, and the feminine oracle that reflects and refracts these struggles. It further considers how trauma and survival strategies are inherited and evolve across generations—how masculinity, too, is shaped by generational scars and possibilities.

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Midnight at the Arcanum: Absence, Projection, and Surrogate Myth

 

In Midnight at the Arcanum, the character of Conrad Kirk lives in the shadow of a stepfather who denies the possibility of his literary future. This man is not an active agent of abuse in the text, but rather a voice of cynicism and limitation—a figure who cannot see, and therefore cannot validate, Conrad’s emergent self. The story “It Ain’t Never Gonna Happen” is a direct dramatization of this struggle, where a young writer’s first complete novel is destroyed (literally pissed on) before it can be validated, leaving only the resolve to write again.

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There is no moment of reconciliation. The stepfather remains fixed, unyielding. Conrad does not forgive or overcome him; he surpasses him in the only way possible—through output, through authorship, through living the very discipline he was denied. This is not a story of healing, but of outpacing. The stepfather functions as a fixed post against which the child must torque himself into adulthood. And yet, Midnight does not linger in revenge. Instead, it frames this struggle as the mythic first wounding—necessary, painful, generative.

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The women in Midnight are instrumental in illuminating the patriarchal structures Conrad internalizes and resists. Vanessa offers erotic connection but later recoils from being turned into symbol or muse, berating his arrogance in interpreting her without her explicit permission; her departure catalyzes Conrad’s confrontation with performative masculinity. This moment critiques not only the male gaze, but the symbolic appropriation of women as instruments of male development or aesthetic commodity—highlighting the implicit transactionality of woman-as-symbol in the bildungsroman tradition and critiquing broader literary traditions in which women are framed as 'rewards.' Hélène, the Francophone director and intellectual interlocutor, provides a collaborative, non-romantic mirror of ethical presence, refusing to be in any way tamed and knowing her own boundaries as to where the line between complicity and coercion exists for her own soul. Anne-Jolie is the embodiment of adult erotic autonomy and constraint, and her refusal to abandon her husband challenges Conrad’s ideas of possession. Phoebe, a metaphysical composite, becomes a figure of witness and grace—she does not heal Conrad so much as affirm his capacity to live ethically as she seeks her own path, not with him as her guru or guide, but fellow traveler. By contrast, Conrad’s mother, in the story “It Ain’t Never Gonna Happen,” functions as an enabler of patriarchal violence: she urges secrecy, asks Conrad to withhold truth to protect the family from the stepfather’s wrath. In doing so, she inadvertently upholds the very system that silences her son.

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The Ancestral Sea: Historical Reckoning and Ethical Inheritance

 

If Midnight situates the father as obstacle, The Ancestral Sea asks a harder question: what happens when the father is beloved, and yet the site of trauma? Cyrus Drake’s father, Ansel, is not abusive, but he is unknowingly betrayed—his closest friend is the man with whom Cyrus’s mother, Noushin, has an affair. Young Cyrus witnesses the moment, internalizes the guilt, and buries it so deeply that he cannot paint, cannot love, cannot move forward.

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Here the father is not a tyrant but a ghost. His goodness becomes a kind of curse. Ansel Drake represents a lost era, a model of moral uprightness and political idealism that Cyrus feels he has tainted. He must undergo a dual journey: to reclaim his mother’s truth (which includes her pain and context) and to recover his father’s memory not as a flawless patriarch, but as a man—fallible, limited, worthy.

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In this novel, the surrogate father figure is Suleiman Hajj, whose late confession to Cyrus about Noushin’s final hours reshapes Cyrus’s understanding of both parents. This confession functions as a second paternal reckoning: a moral reparenting that restores emotional agency to Cyrus and allows him to resume both painting and loving.

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The women of Ancestral are no less pivotal. Salomeh Arashpour challenges and ultimately completes the circuit of Cyrus’s ethical maturation. Her betrayal—sleeping with his friend Cohen—is not rendered as treason but as a complex, autonomous act that refuses patriarchal scripts. Cyrus’s refusal to punish, shame, or possess her is the narrative’s most radical gesture. Salomeh’s dialogue, not her apology, becomes the axis of recovery. Badria—the matriarch of Cyrus’s ancestral village—functions in counterpoint. Her secrecy about Cyrus and Salomeh’s forged marriage papers is not born of manipulation, but of a protective instinct: to shield family honor and physical safety in a world where patriarchal violence looms large. Her complicity is generational, not malicious—a tragic fidelity born from deep experiential understanding of a code that has harmed women for generations. The evolving intergenerational strategies—Silence, Confession, Dialogue—form a throughline of how trauma is managed, inherited, and eventually transmuted into liberation.​

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Touched by Fortune’s Shadow: The Quiet Supremacy of Character

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It’s in Touched by Fortune’s Shadow that Brett bests his father—physically, ethically, and spiritually. Arthur Lloyd-Ronan, a successful but alcoholic engineer, represents the most direct paternal antagonist in the trilogy. Unlike Conrad’s stepfather or Ansel Drake, Arthur is present, belligerent, and loaded with patriarchal expectations. When Brett was fifteen, he confronted his father after Arthur had smashed all the plates and kitchenware during a drunken rage. The confrontation escalated to violence, and Brett used his judo training to restrain his father without striking him. The father, recognizing his son’s superiority in the archaic tradition of “you’ve bested me, therefore you are your own man now,” capitulates. But the deeper victory lies not in the physical outcome—it lies in Brett’s self-possession.

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This confrontation is not only about physical courage; it is about setting a moral boundary. Brett’s refusal to let Arthur’s alcoholism dictate the terms of their relationship becomes a lifelong stance. As a teenager, Brett insists he will not speak to his father again unless Arthur has a 30-day sobriety token in his hand. It is a reversal of power: the son becomes the one with standards, with terms, with ethical clarity. This sets in motion Arthur’s path to recovery, one that ultimately results in his achieving and maintaining 14 years of sobriety. Brett’s quiet victory becomes a transformation for them both, and leads to a real, healthy, fruitful relationship of mutual respect and support.

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The women of Touched are neither mirrors nor muses. They are architects. Manijeh Yazdpour is Brett’s partner in every sense: intellectual, romantic, spiritual. Their alliance dismantles the patriarchal notion of marriage as possession. Manijeh keeps her surname not in defiance but in fidelity to her lineage. Taraneh Khoshrangi joins them not as a third wheel but as an equal in a fully consensual triadic bond. Brett’s love for both women—and their love for each other—is not transgressive but integrative. It heals nothing, but affirms everything.

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Even more than the women of Midnight and Ancestral, the women of Touched co-author the narrative’s moral conclusion. There is no man without them. Their consent is not granted to Brett; it is mutual, dialogic, sovereign. They are not prizes for his moral evolution. They are its conditions. This resists broader literary traditions where women are framed as 'rewards'—the narrative undermines such framing by giving women agency, complexity, and equal narrative weight, thereby rejecting reductive tropes and affirming the co-authorship of love and selfhood.

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Conclusion: From Struggle to Sovereignty

 

In each novel, the father figure serves a different function:

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• In Midnight, he is the antagonist whose disbelief must be outwritten.

• In Ancestral Sea, he is the lost love whose memory must be redeemed.

• In Touched, he is the flawed inheritance who must be ethically eclipsed.

 

In each novel, too, the women serve not as props or archetypes, but as co-agents of reckoning—challengers, lovers, and truth-tellers—who bear witness to the protagonists’ escape from the patriarchal script. At times, they also uphold it, as seen in Brett and Conrad’s mother—each acting from fear, each perpetuating harm through silence or compliance.

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Together, these arcs show a generational arc of masculinity and femininity: from opposition, to reckoning, to self-authorship. The trilogy presents personhood not as something inherited, but as something authored—painstakingly, lovingly, and ultimately, freely. That we are able to explore the protagonists’ love interests with a depth that transcends their being mere foils to male centers, making them co-authors of personhood rather than rewards or plot devices, resists dominant gender tropes both in postmodern and genre fiction. This is not mere slight-of-hand or technique: it is a deliberate, thoughtful intervention into literary traditions that have long relegated women to symbolic capital in male arcs. By granting these women narrative agency, ethical autonomy, and complex relational power, the narrative reframes the gendered architecture of fiction itself—transforming what it means to love, to be seen, and to co-create meaning on the page. from opposition, to reckoning, to self-authorship.

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That we are able to explore the protagonists' love interests with a depth that transcends their being mere foils to male centers, making them co-authors of personhood (the protagonists and their own in tandem) rather than mere roles to be filled in romance, postmodern or genre, is more than slight-of-hand or technique, but intentional reader-response informed exploration.

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And in doing so, it offers not a new myth of the father, but a narrative praxis of dismantling the literal patriarchy.