Isabel's+Epiphany

p. 17-18, “God-world.”

This passage is about understanding what you want in life and the importance of it. Isabel had an epiphany. She realized that she needed everything to be real, her thoughts, her life and her words. By having the experience of coming to a new place and having to sell her ideas to unknown people and then having them agree, made it real, made her ideas worth something. Isabel discovered that not only were her ideas real but that the moment was real too. While she was debating, she could feel the students listening to her and absorbing her information like a sponge, “I could feel it on my skin!” (17). The learning was real, it was physical. Through that physicality she was left with nothing but herself, “I have never before had so…so exciting…a sense of myself!” (17) Through this understanding, Isabel sees the vastness of poverty for the first time, “If you put together all the Brakwaters in the country together, then it’s a pretty big one… hell of a lot of people live in it!” (18). Because of this reutilization Isabel is able to understand Mr. M’s passion for her and Thami to succeed. This is clearly seen at the end of the play when Isabel refuses to amount to nothing. Through the understanding of what is real Isabel is able to understand the quantity of poverty, and the effect that one person can have on it. Isabel uses that epiphany to reach for higher goals for herself. The goals and expectations that were set for her were given within the confines of the small world of Camdeboo, but Isabel brakes free of that limited world, to build her own future.

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