The narrator of “Funes, the Memorious” is unnamed. The narration is from the first-person objective point of view, and the narrator recounts his past experience with Ireneo Funes, the titular character. Funes was “a kid from Fray Bentos, with incurable limitations.”

The narrator feels that he has no right to use the word “remember” because it is a “sacred verb.” In fact, only Funes himself has a right to use the word, because of his incredible, yet debilitating, memory.

The narrator recalls meeting Funes in 1884, when the narrator’s father took him to Fray Bentos, Uruguay. The narrator and his cousin Bernardo are riding horses when they come across a young Indian boy—Funes. Bernardo asks Funes what time it is, and without consulting a clock or even the sky, Funes responds with the correct time down to the minute. Bernardo explains to the narrator that Funes is known as a peculiar person who avoids others and always knows the time “like a clock.”

A few years later, in 1887, the narrator returns to Fray Bentos and asks after Funes. He is told that Funes has been paralyzed after being thrown by a horse. He later finds Funes in his bedroom smoking a cigarette, and the two talk all night. The narrator explains that he would rather impart the veracity of the conversation to the reader than the exact words that were said, as these words are difficult for him to remember.

Funes begins by describing many historical figures who had incredible memories, which were perhaps as developed as his own. When the horse threw him a few years prior, he transcended his “blind, deaf, addlebrained, absent-minded” self and awoke from unconsciousness to a present that “was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness.” Funes does not seem to care that he is paralyzed, because his perception is incredibly acute and his memory is exact. While a regular person might perceive three glasses atop a table, Funes can perceive every leaf on a tree and every piece of fruit on a vine. He invented an original system of numbering that honored the individuality he saw in each thing, though it could not be understood by anyone else. He even tried to invent a new language that would do precisely the same thing, but he gave up, feeling that he could not make it specific or detailed enough. Funes’s perception is now so advanced that he can perceive decay and the coming of death. He even finds it difficult to fall asleep.

When the sun comes up, the narrator can see that though Funes is physically nineteen years old, he seems “older than the prophecies and the pyramids.” Sadly, Funes dies two years later at the age of twenty-one.