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Multiple Decisions In The Garden Of Forking Path

Decent Essays

The possibility of having multiple decisions occur at once is displayed in a short story written in 1941 called “The Garden of Forking Paths”. This concept makes the short story seem more like a giant puzzle that always has a missing piece. With the outer edges solved creating a frame narrative with the theme of time which the author wrote to confuse the reader. Said by Mr. Dewey, if you read this story and understand it then you didn’t read the story properly. Meaning you didn’t dive deep enough into the reading, just read around the edges, the frame, and didn’t come close to or reach the core of the short story. You can compare the format of the story to a magic trick where the author is the magician. The magic trick the reader is presented with is how can multiple decisions occur at once. …show more content…

When he believes his cover is blown when a fellow spy ends up dead he makes the rash decision to make one final attempt to inform his Chief. On a race with time Yu Tsun knows of only one way to make sure that the Chief in Berlin will receive the message. So he goes out and kills a man named Stephen Albert whose name now paints the newspaper. Thus making it possible for the Chief to decipher that the city Albert is where he must attack. Another feature in the story that got my attention was when the main character Yu Tsun compared his childhood as a “ damp path zigzagged like those of my childhood.” (1341) this sentence in the paragraph jumped out to me because it didn’t seem to fit in with what Albert and Yu Tsun were talking about. Furthermore, Yu Tsun’s childhood is never mentioned in the story, only in this one line. Another part in the story I found intriguing was when Yu Tsun and Albert were discussing the Ts’ui Pen labyrinth and how the labyrinth was the entire world plus time

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