Abstract on “The Garden of Forking Paths” Final Research Project

This paper, entitled “Narratives, Realities, and Identities in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths,’” focuses on the short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges was a twentieth century Argentinian writer who mainly wrote short fictions, and the version of this story that was used was translated by Donald A. Yates for the collection Labyrinths. I argue that Borges creates a labyrinth in this story that not only captures the reader, but Borges himself and the characters within the story. He does this mainly by his use of language and specific words and the use of the book within a book device. The main theoretical frameworks I used are new historicism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and a tiny splash of deconstructionism. I organized my paper in this order, but after an initial summary of the short story. In this paper, I focused on Borges’ history, both personal and broad, before moving into the specific structures he created to form his complex and winding maze of a short story.