Bell-Villada, Gene. Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1981. (A great book on Borges)

A rather long (but detailed) listing of the themes of Borges's work.  Play the literary version of "Where's Waldo" and see how many of these themes you can find in the stories in the assignment.

"A word is in order regarding what is best known in Borges's work -- his "themes," the subjects and notions that permeate his writing. Some of the more outstanding of these are: the hallucinatory character of human existence; the illusory nature of the physical world; the inevitable arbitrariness of all rational thought; infinity and infinite possibilities; the idea that the most minuscule event implies and contains the entire universe; the idea that everything we can imagine has either happened already or will happen eventually; the conceit that every man is also another man and even all men; a character who realizes he is better off as someone else; a character who believes he is winning when he is really losing; Time as but another illusion; "circular time" and especially "eternal recurrence"-the idea that the number of personal experiences, though vast, is finite and consequently events can occur again in the future; remote settings (Babylon, Prague, Araby); an attitude of amazement (Borges cannot understand authors like Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis who do not "marvel at the universe"); hatred of mirrors because they multiply reality; and the sudden moment of mystical insight and total understanding. Most significant, of course, is the famous and omnipresent labyrinth, Borges's most characteristic motif, just as sweetly whimsical machines and moons are immediately identifiable as Paul Klee's fancies, bowler hats and floating apples as those of Magritte. The labyrinth sums up Borges's delight with multitudinous possibilities and symbolizes the idea of a bewildering universe, the complexities fashioned by men" (Bell-Villada 52).

Have fun -- and may the best reader win!!

Note: The winner gets an all-expense* paid trip to . . . . the OCC library.

*By expense I mean the cost of walking from your car to the library -- which the prize promoters have calculated to be equivalent to a bite-sized Snickers bar. This prize is non-transferable and can be subsituted with whatever candy/snack Mr. Bordelon happens to have in his cache of food in his office.