Against epiphany's overuse in the contemporary short story landscape, as well as its logic of "personal fulfillment," I broadly suggest that in his short fiction Wallace consistently seeks to shed the epiphany of the calcification and stagnation it's come to have in short fiction, redeploying it as a radical site of connection between author and reader. In reimagining the epiphany concept as a space to interrogate his own readers' capacity for feeling or emotional clarity, Wallace's short fiction comes to challenge not only the solipsism of the more popular domestic or psychological fiction in which the epiphany concept is most commonly applied. [...]