Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges was removed from the origin of The Bhagavad-Gita by thousands of years and miles, yet his works bear remarkable similarities to The Gita’s teachings. Specifically, Borges’ short stories, “The Immortal” and “The Library of Babel,” reflect and parallel the teachings of the sacred Hindu text, The Bhagavad-Gita, namely, its assertion that desire creates suffering and inhibits the pursuit of knowledge, and its perspective that divinity and spirituality can be found…
Both of the narratives “Borges and I” Jorge Luis Borges and “Hole in the Wall” by Etgar Keret employ the device of multiple worlds in their narrative. Borges introduces a multiple world in “Borges and I” through the use of an embedded narrative. According to Abbot, an embedded narrative allows for “another world to open up with its own story and central character” (Abbot 167). An embedded narrative typically unfolds organically from the thoughts of the main character or the voice of the narrator…
In The Library of Babel by Jorge Borges as well as S. by Doug Dorst, people and books are weaved together in inseparable ways. While The Library of Babel deals with more of a big picture version of people’s relationships with books and each other, S. provides in-depth characterizations as well as powerful relationships. Despite a major difference in how characters interact with each other and the rest of the world in these two texts, each story focuses on how people are deeply affected by books…
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…
Within the delicate brushstrokes of the artist lies an image of vitality and beauty, comprising the portrait of one young and misguided individual. Driven by his desire to fulfill his lustful temptations, he evolves, the man in the frame, into an individual so vile one cannot stand near without inhaling his moral corruption. Physically, the man of the portrait, Dorian Gray, as having sold his soul to retain his current health and beauty, remains ageless and pristine as he continues in the…
Vikings lost but countless lives were lost. The Battle of Brunanburh is one of the bloodiest battles in Anglo-Saxon history and it is the topic of both the Anglo-Saxon epic translated by Burton Raffel, “The Battle of Brunanburh,” and the modern lyric by Jorge Luis Borges, “Brunanburh A.D., 937.” Both poems describe the bloody battle scene but despite being about the same event, the two poems have differences. Though both poems are describing the same historical event, they have differing points…
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,…
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 let go of many details . In, Funes the Memorious, Jorge Borges shows…
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…