Ficciones
Jorge Luis Borges (1944)
“The book that invented postmodern fiction, written by a blind librarian who believed the universe was a library with no exit.”
EraPostmodern / Latin American
Pages174
Difficulty★★★★★ Expert
AP Appearances5
Character Analysis
Many stories feature a first-person narrator identified as 'Borges' — a librarian, a scholar, a man of letters who discovers extraordinary things and reports them with academic calm. This narrator is not identical to the real Borges but is his literary double, a character who shares his biography but inhabits a world where fictions invade reality. The distance between Borges-the-author and Borges-the-character is the space where the stories operate.
How They Speak
Erudite, self-deprecating, parenthetical — speaks as a learned man addressing other learned men, but constantly undermining his own authority.