In The Garden of Forking Paths, Jorge Luis Borges introduces the motif of a physical labyrinth while simultaneously constructing a story plot within a labyrinthine text. Protagonists Dr. Yu Tsun and Dr. Stephen Albert describe Ts'ui Pện’s labyrinth – which is not only a tangible labyrinth but also a book – as “a labyrinth of symbols” and “an invisible labyrinth of time” (Borges 493). Borges turns the characteristically abstract concept of time into a concrete idea, as actions and reactions bounce back and forth in a contradiction of the customary forward progression of time. As a result, Ts'ui Pện’s physical labyrinth becomes a labyrinth within a labyrinth.
The initial feelings experienced when reading The Garden are akin to the sensation of …show more content…
Albert and tells Tsun, "Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy," (Borges 496). Then Tsun feels a "swarming sensation" (Borges 496), and only he and Madden are present in the garden. Time has forked again. The dialogue between Albert and Tsun resumes. Tsun says, “The future already exists…I am your friend.” At this point, a pivotal time fork occurs as Albert turns his back and Tsun shoots him. However, time forks again in the garden as Madden enters and arrests Tsun. Tsun is condemned to the gallows. In prison he learns of his spy mission is completed successfully and Dr. Stephen Albert is dead. Tsun says, "I read about it in the same papers," referring to a murder committed "by a stranger, one Yu Tsun." Once again, Tsun’s path has forked, and the story points to Tsun’s statement at beginning of Borges’s textual labyrinth. Tsun’s tangled track was long but not especially difficult to navigate and fraught with twists and turns, and places him back at the beginning of Borges’s novel when he says, “In spite of my dead father, in spite of having been a child in a symmetrical garden of Hai Feng, was I – now – going to die? Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now” (490). Now is the nature of The Garden, as Borges’s construction of