33 pages • 1 hour read
Jorge Luis BorgesThe Garden of Forking Paths
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1941A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Metaphor
Dr. Albert realizes that when Ts’ui Pên announces his plan to write an infinite novel and to construct a maze in which a man can lose himself, he does not refer to two separate enterprises. Ts’ui Pên’s use of the term “labyrinth” constitutes a metaphor for the kind of text he attempts to create, one with infinite diverging paths—but the name of both the story and the novel in “The Garden of Forking Paths” names the labyrinth as if it were a real garden with actual paths. Each time the phrase “garden of forking paths” appears in the story, it may refer to the story, the novel, or the imagined labyrinth that Dr. Albert points out exists only in the novel’s shape. This extended metaphor corresponds with the short story’s widespread polysemy, where words and phrases express multiple meanings simultaneously—like the name “Albert” indicating both a character and a location in the story, as well as paying homage to Albert Einstein, whose theories weave through the text. Even the “duel” between Madden and Tsun (214) represents a miniature of warfare and conflict. The two spies move in tandem, at times more like a chess game than an actual fight. Not only is the ability to understand metaphor, symbol, and polysemy crucial to reading Tsun’s confession, but those skills provide Tsun with the means to convey intelligence to his handler in Berlin, who gleans from a news story of Albert’s murder the name of the town to attack.
Irony
While many writers use irony for satire, Borges incorporates coincidences, correspondences, and parallels to achieve several effects. While his ironic moments can be humorous and illuminating, they can also be poignant or even rueful. Irony in Borges, as with many Latin American writers, can be an expression of hope in the face of repression, or it can be a capitulation to inevitable despair.
The plot of “The Garden of Forking Paths” provides the deepest irony in the story: Though Dr. Albert is the stranger whom Tsun chooses to kill as the only means to convey to Berlin the location of the British artillery installation, this Sinologist also turns out to be Tsun’s only link to his personal past; the key to his legacy; the instrument for understanding his past, present, and future. Tsun articulates the scope of that irony as he awaits execution when he says, “Abominably, I have yet triumphed!” (220, emphasis added), coupling words that by definition contradict one another.
Tsun’s confession also reveals that he bears no allegiance to Germany and if anything finds the English more civilized and appealing. Coerced into spying for what he calls a “barbarous country” (213), he admits that the Chief’s distrust of Chinese people incited Tsun to “prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies” (213). Yet Tsun’s interaction with Albert offers him the greatest opportunity to understand and enhance his cultural identity. Nevertheless, Tsun kills Albert to fulfill his task for the Chief. When the story begins, Tsun fears his voice will be “silenced by a bullet” (213) before he can deliver his secret. In the end, a bullet turns out to be the exact tool that he uses to magnify his voice and send his message successfully.
Parallels and Mirroring
Parallels and mirroring—through plot, characters, setting, imagery, and even diction—are formal elements accentuating the idea of bifurcation, especially bifurcated fates. With these elements, Borges thus mirrors many key aspects of “The Garden of Forking Paths.” For example, the two Captains, Liddell Hart and Richard Madden, represent fictional and historical English military figures, but Madden also serves as a foil Tsun, as each character spies for a government that is not his own. Moreover, both Tsun and Albert are doctors; in an ironic twist, their areas of expertise seem reversed: Dr. Tsun teaches English while Dr. Albert is a noted Sinologist.
The story shares its title with a fictional novel by a fictional author, but when characters make statements about “The Garden of Forking Paths,” those statements can apply to either the story or the novel, or even the physical garden Tsun navigates as he approaches Albert’s house. The Garden of Forking Paths also names Ts’ui Pên’s imaginary labyrinth, which turns out to be the book itself.
Images and actions repeat like bookends in the text. According to the note from “the original manuscript editor” (212), Viktor Runeberg threatens Madden with an automatic pistol, a scene that prefigures Tsun’s shooting of Albert with his revolver. The image of the moon that “hung low in the sky as if to keep [Tsun] company” (214) returns when Albert greets Tsun holding “a paper lantern shaped like a drum and colored like the moon” (215). In order to illustrate the way he came to understand The Garden of Forking Paths, Albert uses a story about The Thousand and One Nights, hinting that it, too, is an infinite text. When Albert reads to Tsun from his ancestor’s work, the passage describes an epic military campaign—the subject of Liddell Hart’s work, the supposed source for the entire excerpt that makes up Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths.”
Tsun examines himself before departing on his mission, looking into a mirror where he “took leave of myself” (213), as if he planned to become someone else. After experiencing his ancestor’s work and discussing it with Albert, Tsun sees himself again in infinite number, along with infinite versions of Albert, surrounding Albert’s house. These invisible figures represent alternate versions of Tsun and Albert, “busy and multiform in other dimensions of time” (219). Tsun’s corresponding instances of confronting his own identity, separated by his visit to the Garden of Forking Paths, demonstrate the change to his awareness that these events have wrought.
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