Theme Relationships - Essay Example

As well, the textual concepts of the way in which meaning and historical belief are reconciled provides context for the story. The development of “The Garden of Forking Paths” creates an understanding of the connection and relationship of history to literature as it explores textual complexities that are defined though specified time and place. The protagonist of the story “The Garden of Forking Paths” is a man who is trying to prove a point through misguided actions. Dr. Tsun is a man who is a participant and a spectator of World War II.

He has been recruited by Germany to spy on Britain for them in order to find an artillery station. He doesn’t do it because he believes in the cause or because he is being paid well to do it, but he betrays Britain because he wants to prove to his German overseers that an Asian man has the intelligence to obtain the information. Tsun says “I did it because I sensed that the Chief somehow feared people of my race - for the innumerable ancestors that merge within me. I wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies” (Borges, 2006, p. 56). .

The story “The Garden of Forking Paths” was published in 1948 in English within Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (Bloom, 2004). For most of Borges early life during the first quarter of the twentieth century, he would have been aware of a dependence that his country had on other countries for economic stability. Having lived in Switzerland and able to travel to countries in Europe, his perspective on the lack of industrial growth within his own country would have been informed and influential.

Just previous to his birth, independence had been taken by the Latin countries, separating them from their Spanish rulers (Craig et al, 2009). Therefore, during his early life, Borges would have come to understand the conflicts and instability that follow when a country begins to exist independent of a nation that is more developed and has greater power. Having established political independence, the search for economic independence and political stability made Latin America a place that was highly volatile and often discriminated against for its still developing infrastructure during the early twentieth century.

Therefore, in writing about a man who is conflicted over the attitudes of others to the point that he commits a damaging act against a nation to prove the intellect and capability of his people and of himself, may reflect a need that Borges may have had in proving that the people of his own nation were likewise intellectually capable. In making the protagonist an Asian man, he touches upon an imposed ’otherness’ that is commonly associated with Asian cultures and imposed upon third-world nations (Naficy & Gabriel 1993).

In understanding the alienation of his own culture through lowered levels of industrialization and undeveloped political