Reading Response

Jorge Luis Borges/ Library of Babel

The story is told in the first person. The narrator draws a parallel between the universe and an infinite library, where all knowledge, such as the knowledge of origin of the world: “the origin of the Library and of time” is stored. The library consists of infinite amount of identical hexagons. Each one of them is inhabited by a person, whom the narrator calls “librarians”. He himself lives in one of the hexagons (interesting fact, that the author himself was a librarian, that makes the story real in spite of it being a fiction).

There is an unlimited amount of books consisting of the same characters, but there is no two identical books. They all are the various combinations of characters: “In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols.” Nobody can ever explore the whole library, because it is infinite. And therefore nobody can receive the full knowledge of the Universe, most of it is out of reach.

There is the analogy with religion in the text: “The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad …” Where Vindications can be understood as Bible or the holy book of other religion, and the “rushing up the stairways” as an analogy of numerous religion wars.

The narrator describes the world metaphorically. He draws parallels between this infinite library and the Universe, telling us the history of the world in very abstract, but understandable terms.