Summary Of Jorge Luis Borges 'The Garden Of Forking Paths'

The Garden of Motivation In difficult situations, people attempt to rationalize harsh tasks before completing them. In Jorge Luis Borges's fictional short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a Chinese man named Yu Tsun is forced to spy against the British during World War I for Germany. His mission is to reveal the location of the city named Albert, a task he completes by murdering Stephen Albert, a man with the same last name. It is clear from the story that Yu Tsun has reservations about assassinating Albert because Yu Tsun detests spying and despises Germany. Yu Tsun also respects Albert and is grateful to Albert for solving his family's puzzling mystery about a book, The Garden of Forking Paths, written by Yu Tsun's ancestor. At a first glance, it is unclear why Yu Tsun follows through with his mission if he …show more content…
Albert says that a character in a normal fictional story “chooses one [possibility] and eliminates the others” (Borges, 125). In these fictional stories, every character's choice removes all the possible alternatives, supposedly constituting one future. The Garden of Forking Paths is different because it allows all the outcomes to occur. Stephen Albert describes this phenomenon as “an infinite series of times, a growing...web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times” which promotes an all encompassing idea of how the world functions (Borges,127). Essentially, every single choice occurs in a different world as time moves forward. These choices create futures of different outcomes that deviate from each other. Some of these choices lead to different results and other choices lead to the same result. Furthermore, some choices do not even matter because nothing in the future changes. As opposed to one future, The Garden of Forking Paths presents the idea that there are many worlds that actually contain all of the choices and outcomes