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Course Hero Literature Instructor Russell Jaffe provides an in-depth summary and analysis of "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" of Jorge Luis Borges's short story collection Ficciones.
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The fantastical short stories in Jorge Luis Borges's Ficciones, or Fictions, use inventive techniques to blend the surreal with the plausible.
Bizarre planets are discovered, imaginary texts are investigated and written, murders are committed, and dreams bleed into waking life.
Many of these stories are about the creation of stories themselves. A man stops time during his execution so that he can finish his tale, but never lives to tell it because he is immediately killed upon finishing it. Another attempts to rewrite Don Quixote word for word without copying it.
Through their inversion of traditional narrative structure, these strange scenarios illuminate the human relationship to time and space, fiction and reality.
In such diverse settings as ancient Babylon and modern Argentina, the stories of Ficciones present mazelike puzzles and philosophical paradoxes.
Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones was first published in 1944. As a child in Argentina, Borges spent long hours reading in his father’s extensive English library. Borges’s stories reflect his boyhood fascination with H. G. Wells’s time travel stories and Miguel de Cervantes’s adventures of Don Quixote.
The short stories in Ficciones contain many important themes, including infinity, showing that humans are mortal, while thought and art can be endless. Copies are also important, as fictional worlds and imitated books become more real, and more valued, than the originals. Interpretation is another theme, as detectives, spies, and scholars examine texts for multiple meanings. Important symbols include labyrinths and mirrors.
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