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  • Essay / The role of the author and readers from the point of view of Jorge Luis Borges

    In “The Garden of Forking Paths”, Jorge Luis Borges has an interesting narrative technique. An unknown narrator opens the story by summarizing Captain Liddell Hart's report and presenting the testimony of Dr. Yu Tsun. The story begins abruptly with Dr. Yu Tsun's voice speaking in the first person, mid-sentence, as the first few pages are missing. Borges confuses the reader by introducing a new narrator and starting mid-sentence as the reader tries to piece together the missing parts of the text. Borges also writes in a detective-like structure, where he adds clues and clues that the reader pieces together as they read without revealing too much of the ending. For example, when You Tsun visits Albert, he mentions that Albert was "the only person capable of delivering the message" and it is later revealed that Yu Tsun needed to send a message to Berlin: bomb a city carrying Albert's name, and his only way to convey the message secretly was to kill someone named Albert. Another plot twist appears, when Yu Tsun arrives at Albert's house, he discovers that Albert has analyzed and studied the book and labyrinth of Yu Tsun's ancestors. Albert then explains that the book and the maze are the same thing, the unusual non-linear structure in how the book was written led Albert to realize that the book itself was the maze. Ts'ui Pen's book has multiple stories transforming the book into a labyrinth, he suggests that we should not limit ourselves, his book offers all the paths that his stories could take. Ts'ui Pen also interprets time in a different way, he does not perceive it as a simple process, but rather as a labyrinth with different possibilities. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayBorges also plays with story paths, Liddell states at the beginning that the British attack was delayed because of rain, while Yu Tsun explains another In this story, Borges doesn't care about finding out what's really happening, as he plays with the possibilities of alternate timelines. Borges plays with the role of the author, in agreement with certain arguments presented by Michel Foucault's essay "What is an Author", Michel De Certeau's book "The Practice of Everyday Life" and with “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes. essay “What is an author?” » he describes the role and function of the author as post-structuralist, where he is not interested in the author as a real person who directs the storyline and has complete control (pre-critical humanism). First, it asserts that the author is important when it comes to legal construction, related to copyright and plagiarism. Second, Foucault also asserts that literary value plays a role in the attention given to a piece of writing. Third, he explains that authors must be internally consistent, meaning that they write about the same themes over and over again, which shows their progress with that same concept, where new texts can be evaluated against old texts . The Garden of Forking Paths plays with the idea of ​​an author by presenting different narratives and timelines, where we are forced to follow one path while wondering what could have happened with the other. De Certeau's use of the term "history" means a personal and cultural narrative. It seeks to clarify a distinction between space and place. It defines a location as the order in which elements are distributed relative to each other. When we enter a space, »..