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Time Theory In The Short Fiction Of Jorge Luis Borges: The Language Of "Reality", Lyn Lamkin

Graduate Theses

Time boundaries delimit mankind's concerns while subtly affecting the perspective men have on all ontological questions. However, Jorge Luis Borges' short fiction develops an a-temporal perspective that denies the distinctions of a past, present, and future, obscuring traditional human conceptions of time and reality. He repetitively uses cycles and labyrinths as spatial metaphors for time to emphasize man's Inability to escape the maze of existence and to define a final reality that he can order. Borges' fiction suggests that only by trying to understand what exists beyond our universe in an unknowable. Infinite time continuum can human reality be ordered …