Journal on Borges's "Las Ruinas Circulares"
... reader. The moment the grey man realizes he is an entity in somebody else’s dream, I wonder whether I am the dream -or nightmare- of God. In fact, I believe that I -as everybody else- have constructed the image of God in my head. Thus, God is my construction and I am … God’s construction? It seems to me that the importance is not who created whom. Borges’ emphasis lays on the deconstruction of grand narratives. The dogmas of Christian religions are challenged because God, a well as we are, is not more than an illusion. “The grey man” has a “supernatural task” because creating a man belongs to a holy being, or because it is just a fictional mission. Brooker (1992) suggests three stages of images. To me, the one that disrupts our absolutes is the illusion that disguises “the absence of reality”. Our existence is a dream, an illusion, somebody’s imagination. Then, we are just some more characters in the human story. Fiction expands its limits -if it has some- and enters into the world of reality. So the questioning goes on: is there some reality? Well, Borges proves to be skeptical about believing in an absolute, truthful reality. Then, he poses his own viewpoint about religion adding to the battle against the monolithic, mainstream narrative of religion. He speaks about a single microcosmic world because his aim goes against establishing truths. As a postmodern writer, Borges perceives time as circular. The circular temple serves as a symbol of this concept. I imagine that the world goes around a constantly moving spiral or circle, without beginning nor end. Then I remember that the mistakes we make today have already made by somebody else in the past. It’s enough to think about wars and oppression all around the world to realize this belief. In the story, the setting is reddish and grey -the same image brings to me the world I live in. Yet, Borges does no...