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Jorge Luis BorgesA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Borges is the narrator and protagonist of “The Aleph” and shares the name of the story’s author. Borges’s attributes are as enigmatic as the details of his relationship with the deceased Beatriz—his name is not revealed until just before he views the Aleph. Borges admits that his intent to remain unchanging in a changing universe is “melancholy vanity,” which could describe his character as a whole. Disillusioned and sentimental, he concocts the measured pleasure of his annual visits to Beatriz’s family as a bomb. His description of these visits as “melancholy and vainly erotic” (119) says much about Borges the narrator. Through his reactions to Argentino, who is in contrast fully rendered by description, readers see Borges’s vain and melancholy disposition in action.
When Argentino begins his overwrought poetic expressions, Borges does not hold back his criticism of the man who is revealed as his romantic rival. Borges is a writer too, author of a work called The Sharper’s Cards, which the narrator mentions as not having received a single vote in the contest Argentino placed second in. Borges the author wrote an unpublished collection of essays by the same name.
By Jorge Luis Borges
Borges and I
Jorge Luis Borges
Ficciones
Jorge Luis Borges
In Praise of Darkness
Jorge Luis Borges
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
Jorge Luis Borges
The Aleph and Other Stories
Jorge Luis Borges
The Book of Sand
Jorge Luis Borges
The Circular Ruins
Jorge Luis Borges
The Garden of Forking Paths
Jorge Luis Borges
The Library of Babel
Jorge Luis Borges