This week’s readings brought back a lot of childhood memories, as my grandfather used to read Borges’ short stories to me and my siblings when we were younger. I would be lying if I said I remembered which stories he used to read to us as I was very little and mostly fell asleep as soon as he began reading, but it was really nice to now read these stories and actually enjoy the way Borges writes such good stories.<\/p>\n
One of the stories that really caught my attention was “The Circular Ruins” as I loved the twist at the end, yet in this story we can see Borges really enjoys writing about dreams and the “materialization” of physical things in this world (which can also been seen in other short stories such as in “Tl\u00f6n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”). It was really interesting how Borges handles these themes in a way that they are different in every story but we are able to recognize them and compare them. Another thing that was really interesting about this short story was the man’s need (?) and desire to create something, how he then felt bad about his creation not feeling like the rest of the world world, to then realizing that he is also a creation of someone else. Personally, this made me feel a lot of mixed feeling I am still not able to properly portray in this blog, but it mostly made me feel helpless yet not in a negative way (hopefully I get my ideas right by Thursday’s class).<\/p>\n
Another story that I really enjoyed “The Shape of the Sword” as it also has a twist at the story, which is something I really enjoy at the end of such good written stories. The way Borges is able to construct a story with enough plot and complexity of characters in a rather short amount of words when being compared with a novel, is amazing. This was also an interesting turn when comparing last week’s readings, where poetry is not able to portray said complexity of characters, yet in this week we were able to see more complexity in characters even though they were short stories. It was really interesting how Moon talked about his own cowardice in the story, showing us he regrets his actions but it also demonstrates a side of humanity that we all collectively share, which is guilt.<\/p>\n
This week’s question for you guys is: Which themes did you find the most interesting in Borges’ stories?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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