29 pages • 58 minutes read
Jorge Luis BorgesThe Library of Babel
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
The Librarian
The narrative unfolds through the eyes of an unnamed narrator who holds the role of a librarian within a team of librarians dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of the labyrinthine Library. Despite being the primary lens through which readers engage with the story, this narrator’s character remains somewhat ambiguous. He was born in the Library and expects to die there, but little is revealed about his background or personal history. Instead, his character is revealed through his thoughts as he attempts to make sense of the Library and come to terms with the impossibility of ever unlocking its secrets.
Beneath the scholarly exterior of the librarian, there is a deep yearning for something transcendent beyond his own existence. At the end of the story, the narrator reveals a prayer, its intended recipient remaining enigmatic:
If an eternal traveler should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder—which, repeated, becomes order: the Order. My solitude is cheered by that elegant hope (Paragraph 15).
His belief in an infinitely repeating Library—a hypothesis impossible to confirm—is ultimately a wish that order should emerge from apparent chaos. This purely numerical order (randomness, repeated, becomes a pattern) still does not amount to meaning. It doesn’t signify anything, but after a lifetime spent in seemingly infinite randomness, the librarian’s deepest wish is no longer for meaning or truth but simply for order.
The Library
The Library is so vast that its boundaries, if it has any, are unknowable, and its inhabitants—all of whom remain inside the Library from birth to death—are consumed with the unanswerable question of whether it is infinite. In a story with only one human character, the Library (always capitalized) emerges as a seemingly sentient entity wielding formidable agency and power over the librarians who traverse its labyrinthine corridors. No one knows how or by whom the Library was constructed or its books produced, and it thus appears to have existed “ab aeternitate” (as the librarian declares), having no point of origin except in a speculative act of divine creation. In this sense, the Library acts as an allegorical figure for the universe, but it’s important that this is a universe in which nothing exists but books and the shelves that house them. The universe Jorge Luis Borges allegorizes is not a material one but a universe entirely mediated through the texts that, if only they could be read, might reveal its secrets. In placing his protagonist within a vast, seemingly sentient library that can be neither understood nor escaped, Borges demonstrates a connection to the other significant 20th-century allegorist, Franz Kafka, who—like Borges—was interested in what it means for individuals to live within vast, impenetrable, impersonal systems.
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