“The Garden of Forking Paths” is an important short story written by Jorge Luis Borges, a well-known Argentine author. It deals with one of Borges’s favorite theme: the labyrinth. Like many of the other stories in his Ficciones, it is a fantasy that sheds some lights on man’s belief about the nature of reality. As John Sturrock comments, many of Borges’s stories are concerned with “a fantastic world which functions as though philosophic idealism, the doctrine that to be is to be perceived, that the mind creates reality, were accurate description of the way things work” (71). The fantasy invades the real world, and a purely verbal construct begins to modify people’s lives. Our sense of a secure, predictable universe begins to be undercut.

Fantasy and Borges’s Labyrinth: A Short Review Of “The Garden of Forking Paths”

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