Ficciones Themes

In Ficciones, the journeys of many of Borges’s characters (including Borges himself) demonstrate that the discovery of knowledge can be just as important and seductive as the knowledge itself. Perhaps the most famous story in the collection, “The Library of Babel,” goes into extensive detail about the structure and contents of the titular library. This fact alone demonstrates Borges’s reverence for the structures and processes that allow people to disseminate and produce knowledge…

Many of the stories in Ficciones examine the use of language, demonstrating how deeply language is intertwined with human consciousness. Many of the stories in the collection center around a writer and their work, often presenting that work as vast, intricate, or all-encompassing. In turn, the stories themselves come to hint at a fundamental link between language and creation, even when the ideas created by such works are confounding, reflexive, and obscure. To be human…

Many of the stories in Ficciones contain representations of infinitely repeating systems or timelines, thus underlining the infinite nature of the universe. For example, the library in “The Library of Babel” is an infinite system of repeating chambers and shelves, all containing books. Though many of the scholars in the library lament the fact that it would be impossible to search through all the information of the library and discover its secrets, Borges’s narrator…

In Ficciones, many of Borges’s stories make the point that reality can be indistinguishable from illusion and, thus, that reality itself is fragile. For example, in the story “The Circular Ruins,” a wizard attempts to dream a man into existence. Already, this mission speaks to the power of dreams to influence reality. After the wizard spends an unspecified amount of time attempting to dream up this man, he finally manages to create one within…