doi: 10.18178/IJLLL.2023.9.6.461
Analysis on the Space-Time Vision of “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “The Aleph”—From the Function of the Metaphor of Labyrinth and Mirror
Chen Rundi
- Department of Spanish, Faculty of Spanish and Portugal, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China.
Abstract
In daily life, people tend to recognize and thinkabout intangible and difficult-to-define concepts with referenceto known, tangible, and concrete concepts, creating a way tounderstand different concepts in relation to each other. InBorges’ s short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” alabyrinthine manuscript of a novel constantly avoids the conceptof time, while at the same time illustrating the infinitepossibilities of time. The time and labyrinth in the story can beconsidered a pair of “structural metaphors.” The manuscriptwritten by Hsi P’êng is a symbol of the labyrinth of time, whichis like an ever-entwined network, a collection of contingencies,nonlinearities, and multidimensionality. Another story, “TheAleph” tells the tale of the protagonist who is drowned indepression due to the death of his lover, Bejatric when by chance,he discovers a secret hidden in his lover’s cousin’s basement, anAleph, two or three centimeters in diameter, which concentratesall the images and scenes of the universe. The Aleph is the sourceof his poetic talent, his hope of finding his deceased lover, and aspecial “space” constructed by Borges through the metaphor ofa “mirror”. The objective of this dissertation is to briefly analyzehow Borges constructs a “labyrinth”to objectify his vision oftime in the story, and how he uses “mirrors” to express his visionof space.
Keywords
- Spacetime concept
- metaphor
- Borges
- “TheGarden of Forking Paths”
- “The Aleph”
How to Cite
Chen Rundi, "Analysis on the Space-Time Vision of “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “The Aleph”—From the Function of the Metaphor of Labyrinth and Mirror," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, vol. 9, no. 6, pp. 510-513, 2023. https://doi.org/10.18178/IJLLL.2023.9.6.461
Copyright & License
Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).