Ficciones: 11. Theme of the Traitor and Hero Summary & Analysis

Borges describes a plot that he has “imagined.” He writes that the story could be set in any oppressed country, but he has chosen Ireland in the early 19th century as the setting. The narrator of the story is a fictional man named Ryan, the great-grandson of the heroic Irish leader Fergus Kilpatrick, who was assassinated and martyred in 1824. Ryan has undertaken the task of writing a biography of his illustrious ancestor, whose sacrifice he compares to Moses, who perished before being able to reach the Promised Land he fought for. In his research, Ryan finds aspects of Kilpatrick’s assassination enigmatic and begins to seek a deeper meaning.

The crime fascinates Ryan, who sees similarities to Julius Caesar’s life in the story. As he continues to investigate, Ryan finds more and more similarities to Caesar’s story. For example, Ryan finds that Fergus’s comrade James Alexander Nolan had translated Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into Gaelic. Furthermore, the last man to speak to Fergus before his death was a beggar. Ryan learns what those last words were and, upon further investigation, realizes that they are in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Through his own investigation, Ryan concludes that Fergus’s murder, which occurred in a theater, was a theatrical spectacle implicating the whole city. In the days before Fergus’s murder, Fergus assigned Nolan to find the traitor in their ranks. Nolan, discovering that Fergus was the traitor, knows that exposing Fergus would look bad for their cause. Nolan then conspired with Fergus, who felt guilty about the betrayal, to make his death look like a martyrdom. In this way, people would be inspired by their cause, and Fergus could redeem himself. Ryan believes that Nolan foresaw Ryan’s discovery of the plan. As a result, Ryan never reveals this secret and goes on to publish a reverent biography of Kilpatrick, having no doubt that Nolan foresaw that happening, too.