33 pages • 1 hour read
Jorge Luis BorgesThe Garden of Forking Paths
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1941A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Dr. Yu Tsun
Tsun identifies himself as “a timorous man” (213) with a “feeble voice” (220). An English teacher and Chinese national, Tsun makes an unlikely German spy. He claims he knew his fate from the beginning of his actions, accepting “a future as irrevocable as the past” (214). He uses his mild, nondescript identity to his advantage: “From my weakness I drew strength that never left me” (214). But Tsun relates this first-person narrative after events have transpired; no matter how certainly Tsun articulates his resolve, the author reminds us through layers of narration and interpretation that neither the past nor the future can be irrevocable.
Tsun selects Dr. Stephen Albert as his victim because he shares the name of the city the Germans must attack to slow the British advance. This act demonstrates Tsun’s strategic mind, his linear focus on his immediate goal: surviving long enough to deliver this crucial intelligence. But when Dr. Albert turns out to have not only a connection to Tsun’s ancestor, the statesman and artist Ts’ui Pên, Tsun’s world opens up to uncertain pasts, expansive presents, and infinite futures. As a timorous man, Tsun completes the task to which he has committed: he murders Albert, knowing his German contact will interpret the news story. Ending his deposition, Tsun reports his success as the Germans have bombed the city of Albert.
The interaction with Dr. Albert changes Tsun. When Tsun leaves for Ashgrove, he revels at outwitting and outrunning Captain Richard Madden, believing this minor victory foretells his major success. The Tsun awaiting execution, however, takes no joy in the mission’s completion. Neither the English newspapers reporting the murder nor Tsun’s German handler interpreting the murder know what Tsun has lost by killing Dr. Albert, the man who restored Tsun’s past to him.
Tsun still believes in destiny—his deposition more than once alludes to his sense of inevitability and fatedness—but he imagines being more than a single bullet in a revolver, propelled by fear and hatred. The Tsun thrown into the “atrocious enterprise” (214) of warfare commits espionage not out of solidarity with the German cause, but out of his desire to prove to the Chief, his handler, that “a yellow man could save his armies” (213). Once Tsun encounters Albert, a man with true respect for Tsun’s culture and lineage, he perceives a wider scope of possibility. But it is too late to change his fate. Pursued by Captain Madden, he finishes his path “abominably” (220), with a remorse as “infinite” (220) as the Garden of Forking Paths.
Dr. Stephen Albert
Dr. Stephen Albert solves more than one problem in “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Besides unraveling the mystery of Tsun’s ancestor’s missing labyrinth, he also discovers the true subject of his infinite novel, The Garden of Forking Paths. Chosen out of the telephone directory for his name alone, Dr. Stephen Albert provides far more to Dr. Yu Tsun than the means to relay a single word to his Berlin contact. Traveling toward Ashgrove and Dr. Albert, Tsun has no idea that his target possesses the only copy of his ancestor’s life’s work. An Englishman who is also an expert in Chinese history and culture, Dr. Albert gives Tsun a transformative vision of his personal and cultural past, translating and reading excerpts from his ancestor’s work.
Borges presents Albert as a cipher, simultaneously a mystery and a resolution. Yu Tsun approaches Albert’s house already surprised by the presence of Chinese music. His first glimpse of Albert comes in the form of a paper lantern moving toward him, intermittently disappearing behind trees. Tsun cannot see Albert’s face in the shadow from the lantern, and Albert initially seems to mistake Tsun’s purpose in coming. Tsun becomes taken enough with Albert and the information he bears that he forgets his mission briefly, long enough for Albert to deliver the information he has spent years collecting, as if building to his meeting with Ts’ui Pên’s descendent.
In his deposition, Tsun describes Albert as “remarkably tall” with a “deeply lined” face (216), gray eyes, and a gray beard. After he recounts the specifics of Albert’s appearance, Tsun remarks that the man bore “something of the priest, and something of the sailor” (216), again suggesting Albert represents contradiction, or possibly complementary forces. Albert’s conversation with Tsun resembles a Socratic dialogue, with Albert using metaphors, anecdotes, and hypothetical situations to illustrate points to Tsun. He becomes Tsun’s source for the solution of one of Tsun’s greatest personal mysteries: the location and nature of his ancestor’s labyrinth. Albert dedicated years of study to Ts’ui Pên’s The Garden of Forking Paths so that he can say to Tsun with certainty that the book and the labyrinth are the same structure. Albert patiently leads Tsun also to understand that the subject of his ancestor’s work is time; Ts’ui Pên believed in infinite possible worlds. In one of Albert’s only sinister moments, he tells Tsun that in one of these “innumerable futures,” he is Tsun’s enemy (219).
Dr. Albert shares a name not only with the city destined to be bombed but also with the physicist Albert Einstein, whose theories of time and matter are represented in the central themes of the story. Like the fictional Ts’ui Pên, Einstein refuted the traditional ideas of time as an absolute and the past as a concrete reality. Einstein believed time to be an illusion, a device we imagine to anchor ourselves within space. During his conversation with Dr. Albert, Tsun detaches briefly from the illusion of time, perceiving at once multiple versions of himself and Albert moving invisibly around them.
Captain Richard Madden
Richard Madden functions as a force in the story more than as a character. Tsun’s nemesis and pursuer, he also parallels Tsun as a man spying for a country that is not his own: English spy Madden’s heritage is Irish, while German spy Tsun is Chinese. Dr. Albert echoes this cross-cultural alliance as an Englishman who becomes a Sinologist. Both Tsun and Albert bear the honorific of “Doctor”; Madden’s designation as “Captain” Richard Madden corresponds to Captain Liddell Hart, the English military strategist and historian in whose real historical work we find this imagined account of espionage.
Madden first appears in the story at the beginning of the fragment of Tsun’s confession. In the partial sentence that begins this excerpt, Tsun hangs up a telephone when he hears a voice speaking in German on the other end, a voice he recognizes and identifies as Captain Richard Madden. While Tsun identifies his own voice as weak, the sound of Madden’s voice alone sets Tsun on his incontrovertible path. Madden’s voice in Runeberg’s office, Tsun explains, meant Runeberg had been arrested or killed, as well as Tsun’s own impending capture or assassination. At no point in the story does Madden’s voice appear, other than in Tsun’s initial recognition.
Tsun recoils at his “memory of Madden’s long horseface” (212) and declares him “implacable” and possibly capable of “actual treachery” (212). Tsun ascribes his heightened fear of Madden to Madden’s seemingly contradictory allegiance: “An Irishman in the service of England” (212). But Tsun sees himself in direct contrast to Madden’s demeanor in more personal ways. Tsun describes Madden as “fast-moving” and “happy” (212), a man who runs “furiously” to catch the train where Tsun hides “trembling” (214). Tsun even wonders if Madden can possibly have determined his plan, as random as it is, not realizing that Madden must only be following him with vigorous determination. Borges thus shows how Tsun sees Madden less as an individual with character traits and more as an archetypal figure or force.
In the many worlds supposed by each version of “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Madden must fulfill his destiny, just as Tsun must complete his mission. At the moment Tsun detaches from organized time and perceives the whole of the labyrinth and its implications, it is the form of Madden walking up the path that breaks Tsun’s reverie and places the gun with its single bullet in his hand. Madden represents the present in all its urgency, “as strong as a statue” (220), more concrete than time. When Tsun says “Madden broke in” (220), he means both literally into the room and metaphorically into his moment of transcendence. Though Tsun bests Madden by conveying the name of the city of Albert to Berlin, his victory is a hollow one, overshadowed by Tsun’s private grief, one neither the Chief nor Madden can know.
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