Presence Without Performance: 

Jackson’s Epiphanies Trilogy

and the Ethics of Self-Authorship

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Across Midnight at the Arcanum (2023), The Ancestral Sea (2023), and Touched by Fortune’s Shadow (2024), Quinn Tyler Jackson composes a trilogy that functions not merely as literature but as a sustained act of existential scrutiny. These works do not dabble in philosophy; they interrogate it, drawing figures such as Derrida, Barthes, Sartre, Freire, and Hirsch into direct engagement—not as theoretical ornaments but as living tools. Each novel constitutes a distinct mode of inquiry into the ethics of the constructed self. Together, they form a triptych on moral clarity under conditions of epistemological, linguistic, and affective strain.

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This is fiction that resists sentimentality and rejects cynicism. It does not entertain the reader; it implicates them by the simple act of inviting their active engagement. But in doing so, it also risks alienating those who come to fiction seeking consolation, resolution, or affirmation.

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Midnight at the Arcanum: The Authorship of the Self

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The first volume opens not with narrative but with a provocation: What happens when autobiography refuses to resolve? The protagonist—a reflexively self-aware construct—moves through a fragmented apparatus of essay, monologue, citation, and stage direction. The structure itself enacts the first philosophical claim: that the self is never given, only ever assembled.

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Sartre looms largest here. But Jackson does not merely echo Being and Nothingness—he disrupts it, staging the protagonist as both subject and site of resistance to Sartrean clarity. Existence may precede essence, but Jackson pushes the problem further: What if even existence is unstable? What if the “I” is less a point of origin than a recursive hallucination produced by language, trauma, and performance?

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Derrida’s différance becomes more than an intellectual motif—it becomes the protagonist’s ontology. Identity is never fixed, only deferred. The text interrogates not only the construction of self but the very tools used to construct it.

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Yet one must ask: is the proliferation of textual apparatus—appendices, citations, metafictional sleights—an ethical strategy, or a form of philosophical overcoding? At times, the novel risks sacrificing emotional intelligibility for epistemic complexity.

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The Ancestral Sea: Inheritance and the Untranslatable

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If Midnight fractures the self, The Ancestral Sea drowns it in inherited depth. The same protagonist archetype—now differently embodied—moves through a shifting terrain of memory, exile, and intergenerational trauma. The narrative unfolds between Iran and the West, but avoids simple binaries. This is not a story of return or assimilation, but of haunted irreconcilability.

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Jackson’s language here is fluid, dreamlike, and morally fraught. The body becomes archive. Language betrays. Memory is a liquid architecture that cannot be mapped. This is his most affectively resonant novel, and his most politically loaded.

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Freire’s conscientização—the slow awakening to systemic force—is subtly enacted. The protagonist becomes aware not only of his displacement but of the ideological grammars that make him unreadable to others and, at times, to himself.

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However, the absence of postcolonial theorists—especially given the themes of exile and opacity in The Ancestral Sea—might be seen as a missed opportunity in the analysis itself. Jackson, for his part, appears to have exercised Glissant’s “right to opacity” quite deliberately. His refusal to translate trauma or resolve cultural estrangement into digestible narrative arcs aligns closely with Said’s exilic consciousness and Spivak’s notion of untranslatability. These are not merely theoretical echoes—they resonate through the novel’s linguistic density, cultural partiality, and emotional withholding. What the text demands is not comprehension, but attention. Invoking these thinkers would not have corrected an absence in Jackson’s work, but rather illuminated its deeper philosophical kinships—locating its opacity not in obfuscation, but in resistance.

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Derrida’s hauntology underwrites the entire structure: the past returns not as truth but as question. Meanwhile, Barthes’s “death of the author” is not mourned but dissected. Jackson suggests that intentionality still matters—but only if redefined as ethical attention, not control.

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Yet one might ask: Is the novel’s refusal to translate trauma a gesture of integrity or evasion? The opacity is principled, but delicately exhausting. The risk of this mode is that it can render the text impermeable to those without shared cultural or philosophical coordinates. Accessibility is never promised—but its absence may be an agent of gently deterministic reader engagement.

 

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Touched by Fortune’s Shadow: Consequence, Clarity, and the Cost of Principle

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The final novel is Jackson’s most emotionally immediate—and perhaps his most intellectually provocative. Brett, the protagonist, is a financial architect, a quant whose professional life is structured by precision, while his emotional life is undone by irreducible ambiguity. That he is a master-level martial artist and Olympic-tier fencer, capable of lethal response, and has been since youth, is not a flourish, but an acknowledgment of deep trauma and constant readiness in a world he perceives as intrinsically dangerous.

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This is a novel of consequence, not crisis. Brett does not suffer from indecision; he suffers from seeing too clearly: danger and promise are everywhere, and he wanders through a routine of Buddhist non-attachment, seeking neither without due consideration. He refuses bad faith—not as heroism, but as basic hygiene. He does not lie to himself, and does not expect others to understand. His clarity is mistaken for distance, his fidelity for coldness, in an arc of principled endurance.

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Sartre’s ethics of authenticity resurfaces here—not as ideology, but as practice. Brett inventories his failures without spectacle. He does not confess; he accounts. This is where Jackson’s recovery ethos is clearest. It is not spiritualized. It is procedural. Honesty, inventory, amends, integrity. The Five Rings of the Twelve Steps.

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There is a danger, however, that Brett’s restraint can feel affectively flat. Readers habituated to catharsis may misread his steadiness as emotional absence. But this is the point: in Jackson’s world, to remain internally consistent in a misreading world is the act of love.

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Still, the novel may underplay the structural forces—capital, ideology, professional identity—that shape Brett’s world. The quant's clarity risks appearing as personal virtue rather than a hard-won synthesis of systemic literacy and lived discipline. The absence of sociological framing may appear, to some readers, as an ethical vacuum.

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In Sum: A Trilogy of Ethical Interrogation

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Across these three structurally divergent works, Jackson sustains a rare philosophical continuity. This is not a trilogy about identity. It is a trilogy about the moral stakes of becoming legible to oneself.

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The trilogy rejects spectacle, even as it inhabits forms traditionally associated with it—confession, exile, trauma, redemption. There is no performance here. Only presence, rigorously maintained. 

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Jackson’s integration of theory is not incidental. These thinkers are worked with—not cited, not revered, but tested. Yet the absence of analytic interlocutors (no Frankfurt, no Ryle, no Davidson) may suggest a philosophical narrowness.

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Ultimately, these novels do not say that selfhood is constructed—they demonstrate the cost of that construction. Not as metaphor, but as method. The protagonist weeps, walks away, rebuilds, and remains. There is no final revelation. Only fidelity. And perhaps this is where the Knight Terra Press motto comes into play most succinctly as a unifying ethos underlying Jackson’ tour de force: the word is static but the reader is the only oracle. Jackson seems to be asking the reader to supply the unction as they recursively interrogate Jackson's interrogation of the soul. In this sense, Jackson has written as many trilogies as there are readers of the work; a metafictional slight-of-hand revealed if we pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

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Final Judgment

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The Epiphanies Trilogy is not a grand gesture. It is a sustained ethical act. Jackson has composed a body of work that operates simultaneously on the literary, philosophical, and moral planes—without shortcut, spectacle, or self-congratulation. These books are untrendy. They are hard to market. But they are built to last.

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They are for readers who believe, as Jackson clearly does, that the self is something constructed, not discovered—and that construction is a slow, costly, beautiful thing.

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Postscript

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It is worth closing with a reflection on the foundational essay that opens Midnight at the Arcanum: “Reclaiming the Narrative Pedagogy.” Serving as both preface and provocation, the essay lays out Jackson’s core theoretical commitment: that meta-autobiographical fiction, properly deployed, is not merely a literary style but an act of emancipatory resistance. The essay insists that self-authorship—especially when decoupled from the expectations of hegemonic culture—is a form of praxis, a dialogic counter-narrative against both essentialism and institutional storytelling conventions.

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In retrospect, this essay functions as a mission statement for the trilogy, articulating the epistemic, ethical, and political stakes of the work to follow. Jackson’s invocation of Freire, his reimagining of meta-autobiography as a literary pedagogy of the oppressed, and his rejection of fixed narrative identity are not abstract theses. They are fully operationalized across the three novels. The trilogy, in its structural fragmentation, rhetorical ambiguity, and theoretical density, enacts precisely the kind of liberatory narrative praxis the essay champions.

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Where the essay argues that meta-autobiography reclaims authorial agency through self-examination and dialogic engagement, Midnight at the Arcanum performs that claim formally and narratively, refusing closure and foregrounding the instability of the “I.” In The Ancestral Sea, Jackson not only embraces, but exercises Glissant’s “right to opacity,” grounding personal narrative in cultural untranslatability and systemic dislocation. Here, the author claims—and defends—the right not to resolve the text for the reader. In Touched by Fortune’s Shadow, this pedagogy becomes procedural: the quant’s ethical self-monitoring embodies a lived practice of self-authorship, guided not by institutional structures but by internalized discipline and moral clarity.

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Jackson’s trilogy thus emerges not as a series of texts about the self, but as a recursive enactment of the process through which selfhood is written, contested, and made visible under ideological strain. “Reclaiming the Narrative Pedagogy” is not simply the prologue to Midnight at the Arcanum. It is the theoretical keystone of the Epiphanies Trilogy—and it is honored not through adherence, but through performance.

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In this light, Jackson has achieved precisely what he set out to do. His work is not a commentary on liberation through literature; it is a sustained demonstration of it. His meta-autobiographical approach is not merely self-reflexive, but socially reflexive. By merging literary form with critical pedagogy, and by insisting that fiction can be a method of philosophical engagement and moral accounting, Jackson has reclaimed narrative not just as a site of self-expression—but as a field of ethical action.