The Labyrinths In The Borgesian World

In ‘The Circular Ruins’, Borges tells the story of a man who goes to an abandoned temple to dream up another man. The journey he takes to do so, causes the reader to live inside his head and think the way he thinks, up until the man who dreams realizes he is also a product of a dreamer. The narrator ends the short story saying “With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he was also an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.” (44) The narrator discloses that the man who dreams is the dream of another man and that he is an illusion as well. Borges was able to create a world inside a world in the reader’s head.

Unable to know any better, people’s blindness to the truth about their existence throughout the ages has been relative to the questioning of reality. We search but are unable to the see the truth through the illusion that the world before us has portrayed. One might ask, how do we know what is real and what is simply illusion brought by our subjective view of the world? But when attempting to understand the nature of our existence, about why we are here, the complexities of life often make it difficult to interpret this subject. The film The Matrix centers on this same concept that the known world is an illusion. The movies core theme of reality and illusion is definite to the humans understanding of what the true meaning of life is. Ones

For example, Yu Tsun had a grandfather who wrote an incomplete novel about labyrinths and who also tried "to construct a labyrinth in which all men would get lost." During his journey, Yu Tsun begins to ponder over his grandfather's lost labyrinth. Then, he says, "I forgot my destiny of one pursued. I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, and abstract perceiver of the world . . . The road descended and forked among the now confused meadows" (Borges 23). As a result of thinking about the maze, Yu Tsun finds himself trapped in a garden maze at Dr. Albert's house (Wiehe 980). Of course, being caught in what is seemingly an imaginary maze introduces a magical element into the story.

The similarities between The Cave and The Matrix are too uncanny. The description of the cave above, which is discussed in the first paragraph of Plato’s seventh book, can be portrayed similarly in

Having read the synopsis from The Matrix, the excerpt from Plato, The Republic, Book VII, 514A1-518D8 “The Allegory Of The Cave”, and the excerpt from Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 1641 “Meditation I Of The Things Of Which We May Doubt”, I am able to conclude that there are similarities as well as differences among these readings. Each question the state of reality in which we live. Is our reality a true state of reality or is it a state of mind we have allowed ourselves to exist in?

“The setting plays an important role in how the narrator discovers the many ways he may die” (2). It is a dungeon full of torturing traps, and the character, as any normal human, feels terror inside his prison and fears his death in any of the cruel ways arranged for him. Still, he has to decide between death and the relief which it brings or life with the interminable agony of being tortured as a lab mouse.

In the background the sun is setting on the horizon. Elie and many others start to cry in anguish, but the worst has yet to come. They still have to march past the bodies of the hanging. “The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish” (64). But then there was the revolting scene of the third rope. It was still moving, the child was not yet dead. He hanged there for more than half an hour wiggling like a worm, “lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes” (65). When Elie passed him he was still alive and his tongue was still red, his eyes still open. Elie heard behind him, “For God’s sake, where is God?” (65). During that night Elie’s soup tasted of corpses.

“All work is stopped, all assemble there, nobody leads the cows out, the cows are there with the rest. At midday, the roll of drums. Soldiers have marched into the prison in the night, and he is in the midst of many soldiers. He is bound as before, and in his mouth there is a gag—tied so, with a tight string, making him look almost as if he laughed.” He suggested it, by creasing his face with his two thumbs, from the corners of his mouth to his ears. “On the top of the gallows is fixed the knife, blade upwards, with its point in the air. He is hanged there forty feet high—and is left hanging, poisoning the water.”

“He had not expected anything like this; he had not thought that this world would be so utterly different from his own that it would intimidate him. On the smooth walls were several paintings whose nature he tried to make out, but failed. He would have liked to examine them, but he dared not. Then

Finally both authors’ stories are rife with symbolism, specifically dealing with the inevitability of time and age. In “The Pit and the Pendulum” the abyss in the center of the dungeon and the swinging, bladed pendulum represent time. The blade gets closer and closer to the helpless victim and even when he is successful in escaping the pendulum, there is another torture in store. The torture – time- is “most unrelenting.” (9) He cannot avoid his impending death.

“The minutes dawdled and the hours dragged like centuries...it tortured him, because he knew he was going to be killed” (Heller 137).

This idea is again prominent when the bullet that is intended to kill Hladik on the day of his execution stops seconds before taking him. Borges states that, “in Hladik’s mind a year would pass between the order of the fire and the discharge of the rifle” (162) as a result of God. If taken at face value, God has intervened as promised in Hladik’s dream. If the reader was to interpret this story in this manner, it is clear that events from Hladik’s dream transform and impact his reality. In which case, Borges clouds the distinction between Hladik’s reality and dreams. However, oddly enough, when Hladik requests the assistance of God in a dream the night before, the librarian states “I myself have gone blind searching for it [God]” (161), indicating that presence of God is questionable at most. If God is not yet found, He could not have given Hladik the extra year. By incorporating these subtle hints, Borges also allows the reader to interpret that it was solely Hladik’s perception of time, rather than the intervention of God, that allowed him another

The Matrix, Plato, and Descartes “See Past Their Nose” Between the Matrix, Plato’s cave analogy, and Descartes’ reflections, the commonality of the three is that all three asked whether the reality they experienced through their senses was indeed real, or if it is but an illusion. The Matrix is the story of a computer-generated “reality” where all live in suspended animation in and live out their lives in a virtual reality. In Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” asks if what are thought to be reality could merely be shadows and is not reality at all. In Descartes Meditations, he reasoned that, since we are capable of being deceived, we could therefore just as likely be deceived about what is true reality.

There are many customs and traditions in religion, like not consuming pork or mixing dairy and non-dairy in the Jewish faith, or meditating in eastern religions. All of these things have a purpose in there respected religions, but there is one that stood out in the traditions of the Christian religion and that was labyrinths. Labyrinths aren’t a new thing some of the first labyrinths where used by the Egyptians in 4500 BCE. The first labyrinths used in the traditions of Christianity where recorded in 324 C.E in Algiers, North Africa. (History) They come in different sizes form the size of buildings to the size of a piece of paper, because of this not many historians can agree on what the labyrinth means and how it got into religion. There are

His work had the desired effect and it truly leaves the viewer mystified by the chaos contained in the piece. The artist first defines chaos as