The House Of Asterion Analysis

The individual is herein shown as lord and master of the world, of his own and unique world. A world that is at his disposal even until the final moment. The last verse, «I bequeath nothingness to no one», which works as testament (not from that who runs, not from that who abandons, but from that who destroys), goes beyond all of this, maximizing –or even better–making the coherence explicit: If he achieves his aim, there would not be nothing to be bequeathed nor anybody whom to bequeath. Because, in line with the metaphysics of the first person singular, for this individual and his world there have not ever been other than himself.
If what it is is what it is for each one, thereby, what it is to be done is what each one believes that it …show more content…
This seems to announce something that could be wrongly understood as a mere matter of literary style. As each one of us do Asterion looks at the world from its own perspective. The House of Asterion tries to recover it. The shape of the story is significant: unlike every author that preceded him, Borges writes the story –how could it be any different? – in the first person. That who tells the story is the individual itself, Asterion, who just like each one of us is unique. «The fact is that I am unique» (1993a, p.569), precisely declares. The only other, the only you is another self imitated by Asterion himself, another self that is not another self but himself: «…but of the games I play, the one I prefer is pretending there is another Asterion. I pretend that he has come to visit me and I show him around the house» (p.570). Asterion will say that his house «is the size of the world; better said, it is the world» (p.570) and is also unique: «here one will find a house like no other on the face of the Earth. (They who declare that in Egypt exists another similar are lying)» (p.569). …show more content…
As in the poem The Suicide the character Asterion has himself –and thereby, his own world– at his disposal even until the final moment, even in the final moment. Indeed, an astonished Theseus –the redeemer Asterion had been waiting for and who in the story only speaks after killing that who had before possession of the word (it does not lack of metaphysic implications) – tells Ariadne in the very end of The House of Asterion: «The minotaur hardly put up a fight» (p.570). A dimension that has not been clarified in the two Borges´ poems to which reference was made before appears here in this story. As a consequence of Asterion´s own careful meditation about his house, a house that is his world, it is proved that