Sun’s primary characteristics. The author further uses this characteristic to develop the broad-ranging theme of labyrinths as actual mazes and as metaphors.

Early in the story, the narrator mentions an Englishman he used to know. Although this man was “modest,” he seemed “as great as Goethe.” In fact, while they were conversing, for about an hour “he was Goethe.” Yu Sun means that even a humble person can be as brilliant as a famous author. And because Goethe is most well-known for Faust, the story of a man who sells himself to the devil, Borges may imply that the narrator has made an evil bargain.

When the narrator reaches Stephen Albert’s house, he is shown into the book-filled library. Among them, he is intrigued to see rare, never-printed Chinese manuscripts:

I recognized some large volumes bound in yellow silk-manuscripts of the Lost Encyclopedia which was edited by the Third Emperor of the Luminous Dynasty.

This emperor and dynasty do not exactly match any actual Chinese emperor. Literary scholars have suggested the model for this character and work as Zhu Di, the third Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, who commissioned an encyclopedia.

As they converse, Albert speculates on philosophies of time. He contrasts this emperor, who was Yu Sun’s ancestor, to a scientist and a philosopher:

Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times.

Isaac Newton was a seventeenth-century English mathematician and scientist who pioneered the field of physics. Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who explored fundamental metaphysical questions. Albert mentions people with two different approaches to time to emphasize that the emperor’s ideas were distinct from both.

In this 1941 story, Borges uses labyrinths figuratively as a metaphor for time. A labyrinth does not proceed in a straight line from point A to point B: instead it offers many forks and paths that head in different directions. Borges uses the labyrinth as a central metaphor to oppose the usual metaphor of time as linear—we are normally, for example, given a "time line" of events leading up to a major historical situation, such as the Civil War, as if the war were an inevitable result of a straight path. Our normal concept of time is of a highway.

Borges wants the reader to see time as like a labyrinth, with many unpredictable or unlikely paths or forks leading to one of many simultaneously possible futures: more like the quantum view of time and space as a multiverse that has become part of modern physics.

Like most metaphors, this one of the labyrinth is an image. We can visualize and feel what it is like to be in a labyrinth, the paths twisting and turning and we ourselves constantly coming to forks where our decision to go one way or the other leads to different outcomes. Borges's story even shows us a "tiny" ivory labyrinth so that we can, mentally, look down on it and see all the many directions in which time can go. This supports the idea that time is not fixed but that different multiverses exist, in which history plays out in different ways.

The confusing, nonnarrative book by Ts'ui Pen also acts figuratively as a labyrinth, as Alfred explains, laying out the new, more complex concept of time in this way:

Fang, let us say, has a secret. A stranger knocks at his door. Fang makes up his mind to kill him. Naturally there are various possible outcomes. Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, both can be saved, both can die and so on and so on. In Ts'ui Pen's work, all the possible solutions occur, each one being the point of departure for other bifurcations.

The central image of the labyrinth helps us understand Borges's concept of time.

If we closely examine Jorge Luis Borges' story "The Garden of Forking Paths," we are bound to notice many allusions. Let's look at a few of them.

The book mentioned in the opening lines, A History of the World War by Captain Liddell Hart, is a real book, and the allusions to it and to its claim about a delay in a planned attack by British artillery set the stage for the "real" account of the incident related in the supposed manuscript that comprises the rest of the story.

The narrator alludes to his childhood in "the symmetrical gardens of Hai Feng." This garden provides a foreshadowing for the discussion of gardens that arises later in the story.

The "Chief" mentioned in the story might well allude to Walter Nicolai, the chief of German military intelligence during World War I. The narrator also alludes to the German author Goethe, who, for the narrator, symbolizes wisdom.

While describing his great-grandfather's novel, the narrator mentions that there are "more characters" in it than in the Hung Lou Meng, an eighteenth-century Chinese novel called Dream of the Red Chamber or The Story in the Stone in English. Like the novel of the narrator's grandfather, Hung Lou Meng is long and complex, but it does not explore the same mysteries.

The name of the grandfather's novel is also allusive (and symbolic), for it can refer to the nature of the narrator's life. That life has become, through the narrator's activities as a spy, very much a maze with twisted paths down which the narrator cannot see.

Dr. Albert alludes to The Thousand and One Nights, an Arabic book of stories. He also speaks of Plato as he discusses the nature and presentations of time.

All of these allusions add depth and interest to the story as readers work to interpret their meanings and figure out how they contribute to this complex little labyrinth of a story.

In "The Garden of Forking Paths," Borges describes in dazzling detail a present capable of taking many different paths to a potentially unlimited, bewildering array of futures. In this endless labyrinth of worlds, all possibilities are contained, providing us with a tantalizing glimpse of what might be. In presenting us with such a dizzying spectacle, Borges prefigures the multiverse interpretation of quantum physics, a theory that bears a striking resemblance to the forked temporal paths of Borges's short story.

But what does all this have to do with modernism? Well, one of the main features of modernism is its presentation of a fragmented, disjointed world that no longer displays the unified characteristics of the bygone ages of Western civilization. In such a fractured cultural environment, where all the old certainties have either vanished or are in the process of vanishing, it becomes increasingly difficult to hit upon a notion of truth which can act as a unifying principle in society.

Borges's textual multiverses arise out of this cultural and intellectual malaise. They take shape as complex intertextual labyrinths, as stories within stories, that multiply and proliferate in seemingly endless directions. For Borges, as with other literary modernists, this is one way of depicting the chaos and fragmentation of the modern world without in any way attempting to establish authoritative truth-claims.

Though not strictly speaking a work of detective fiction, Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” contains a number of elements borrowed from the genre. Here, as elsewhere in his work, Borges wants to explore philosophical and literary ideas, and he clearly believes that in this particular case, using the structure of a detective story is the best way for him to do just that.

The elements of detective fiction present in the story constitute the structure on which Borges hangs his speculations about the nature of time and multiple universes. In this way, a popular genre acts as a kind of gentle induction course in complex ideas that might not otherwise resonate with the average reader. Along the way, there are a number of scenes straight out of a detective story, such as the chase at the railroad station and the cut-off telephone call. As well as introducing us to complex ideas, Borges also wants to entertain us.

As the story is principally concerned with exploring the way that time branches out into an infinite number of futures, it is inevitable that clue-gathering and problem-solving, both crucial elements of detective fiction, should play a major part in the plot’s development. In the time-honored convention of the detective story, Borges carefully plants a number of clues at the start of the story that lead us down the wrong path. Not wishing to give the game away too quickly, he wants us to explore the various paths to which his exploration of infinite paths and futures leads us.