Holding back the light Illuminations, epiphanies and vita nova in Les Orages

In Les Orages, Sylvain Prudhomme departs from the novel to invest the brief form of "stories". This article looks at the collection’s opening short story, in the wake of Dominique Rabaté’s reflections on the renewal of the novelistic epiphany. The aim is to show how the writing captures the characters’ minute upheavals, and how the narrative device, somewhere between anamnesis and undecidable narration, shifts the stakes of this existential seesaw.