How Does Borges Create A Fragmented Reality In The South
Borges’ though his short stories ‘The Circular Ruins’ (1940) and ‘The South’ (1953) establishes a fragmented reality in the stories through his usage of the mise en abyme narrative technique from the way the narrators appear to constantly create and question their reality in the stories. In this essay, I will evaluate how Borges generates parallels of reality within his fictional worlds by the narrators of the tales who seem to create the world around them. Then this is contrasted with the usage of dreams and the stories’ endings. This will be done through analysis of Borges’ narration because he uses a third-person narrative to explore the protagonists understanding of reality from a more objective perspective despite the ambiguity of the
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This observation reveals the illusory nature of reality from the understanding that even our reality is shifting and transforming by the second as even what is real is never exactly the same as it was in the past, even if it is a supposedly perfect replica of that reality. Therefore, this creates an illusory atmosphere to the story that develops the idea of the fictional word being a product of the narrator’s illusion. In addition, the appearance of the gaucho indicates that the world is a dream because the narrator believes that this character is a ‘summary and cipher of the South (his South)’ (158). By emphasising that the gaucho is an icon of the narrator’s own idolised image of the south, this underlines once again that the world is a dream. The dream world is created through the narrator’s surroundings and the people there, which reflects his ideal of the south since the gaucho is a figure he highly respects that is only seen in the south. Lorich theorises that the illusions consequently show that from the way that the narrator is ‘Preoccupied with the totality of mental associations’ (62), this demonstrates how ‘Dahlmann is practically nonexistent physically’ (62). As a result, Borges causes the reader once again to question whether the fictional world in ‘The South’ is simply an illusion created by
This observation reveals the illusory nature of reality from the understanding that even our reality is shifting and transforming by the second as even what is real is never exactly the same as it was in the past, even if it is a supposedly perfect replica of that reality. Therefore, this creates an illusory atmosphere to the story that develops the idea of the fictional word being a product of the narrator’s illusion. In addition, the appearance of the gaucho indicates that the world is a dream because the narrator believes that this character is a ‘summary and cipher of the South (his South)’ (158). By emphasising that the gaucho is an icon of the narrator’s own idolised image of the south, this underlines once again that the world is a dream. The dream world is created through the narrator’s surroundings and the people there, which reflects his ideal of the south since the gaucho is a figure he highly respects that is only seen in the south. Lorich theorises that the illusions consequently show that from the way that the narrator is ‘Preoccupied with the totality of mental associations’ (62), this demonstrates how ‘Dahlmann is practically nonexistent physically’ (62). As a result, Borges causes the reader once again to question whether the fictional world in ‘The South’ is simply an illusion created by