Ficciones

The Shape of the Sword by Borges is a good insight into man’s realization of his flaws and how they can stay with the person to haunt them. The themes of identity and betrayal in the story are explored with someone we see as an everyday hero, a soldier who fought in a war. This was cleverly used as even if the story was made in the 1940’s it is still very common to see soldiers fighting for their country even in 2016. This work in particular is able to connect a common sin of man and with the character in the story, Borges is able to show humanity to a crime we would see as terrible. ( connect these two) * _ This work by Borges is a very interesting one. We see that he usually tackles identity and purpose in his stories (The Circular Ruins being an example, with a character who turns out to not truly know where he came from til the end of the story). He tackles identity in this story in a very interesting manner. He uses two literary devices, the first being flashback and the second is the use of a double in the story. A double is often used to show similarity between characters, think of it as a twin that highlights one of the characteristics of a character. Borges uses this device in the story to show how the Englishman used to identify himself similarly to the patriot he killed in the story. He was a righteous man who wanted to serve his country but ended up betraying his comrades and fleeing. These characteristics show a strong contrast by the end of the story when it…

Mark Wallace writes that the stories that Borges writes “are based on genuine dread of the endless time and space and a wise skepticism, but for the most part that dread happens on the level of ideas and not in the narrative itself as such… the dread comes from contemplating the philosophical puzzle the stories present.” Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius makes the reader contemplate mankind’s need to make connections and see order in a seemingly orderless world. The narrator states that “any symmetry,…

The ability to memorize everything is an ability that many people would do anything for. In Jorge Borges's short story, “Funes the Memorious”, there is a character named Ireneo Funes who gains this ability after getting crippled from falling off a horse. Funes, after the incident, was able to specify everything in his world. He refused to generalize or group anything. Also, he became incapable to communicate well because of the specificity of his language. Lastly, he also became unable to…

My research centers on Jorge Luis Borges and constructs a web of influences on him and his literary oeuvre through examining his many interviews. Throughout his life, Borges consented to hundreds of interviews. Rather than undertaking exhaustive research, I gathered data from nine of Borges’ most widely available interviews, largely conducted in English and issued in prominent, English-language publications. Some interviewers transcribed the interview content in the moment or from tape…

Within Jorge Luis Borges’s short story collection “The Garden of Forking Paths” are the stories Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and The Garden of Forking Paths. Within Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borges introduces the question of metaphysical time and reality by recounting the events surrounding the mysterious land of Uqbar and its lore surrounding Tlon- the third orb. On the other hand, The Garden of Forking Paths questions the knowledge of the universe and linear time as current scientific…

mentions that religion is easier to understand than science. Which in some cases is true. This is because in such religions the truth are in the scriptures and are held to be absolute and beyond question. I thought this was a strong point to his standpoint on the subject. Although it tends to makes sense I do not find it to be creditable or truthful. As I continued my research I decided to use a database using scholarly journals. I came across a source titled Facts, Fiction, Ficciones: Truth in…

Jorge Francisco Isidore Luis Borges (24th August 1899-14th June 1986)’s Other Inquisitions (1964) [originally published as Otras Inquisiciones in 1952] forms a necessary complement to the fictional entities of Fictions (originally published as Ficciones in 1944) and The Aleph (published as El Aleph in 1949) which made him a towering personality in Latin American avant-garde literature. Poet, essayist, critic, translator- Borges is truly a virtuoso. His fiction, a vortex for seemingly the entire…