Dr. Stephen Albert tells Yu Tsun, "The Garden of Forking Paths is an enormous riddle, or parable, whose theme is time...." Likewise, Borges appears to imply that the main theme of the short story "The Garden of Forking Paths" is also time. Early in the narrative, Yu Tsun ponders, "everything happens to a man precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen...."

In this reflection, Yu Tsun portrays time as a linear progression. People experience time as a series of present moments, each following the other. Once a moment passes, it vanishes. Thus, the past is as intangible as the future. Both exist only in the mind: the past as memory and the future as imagination.

Yet, when Yu Tsun reaches Albert's residence, the concept of linear time is challenged. Albert argues that Yu Tsun's ancestor "did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel times." According to this perspective, all presents, pasts, and futures exist simultaneously. Furthermore, each decision a person makes creates a different future. The branching, or forking, of these choices suggests that time is not a straight path but rather a web of possibilities. The labyrinth, envisioned as a forking of time instead of space, leads Albert to reconsider the nature of time.

For a brief moment, Yu Tsun envisions time as Albert describes: "It seemed to me that the humid garden surrounding the house was infinitely saturated with invisible persons. Those persons were Albert and I, secret, busy, and multiform in other dimensions of time." However, Madden's arrival draws Yu Tsun into the future he had chosen when he boarded the train. In that moment, in that present, Yu Tsun kills Dr. Albert.

Besides examining the notion of time in "The Garden of Forking Paths," Borges also investigates themes of order and chaos. Thomas P. Weissert argues that the story's central theme is "chaos and order." Within this tale, there's a novel penned by Yu Tsun's ancestor, described with words like "incoherent," "chaotic," "a jumbled collection of conflicting drafts," and "confused." Essentially, the novel appears to symbolize the essence of disorder.

Albert, on the other hand, believes he has solved the mystery of the lost labyrinth and the novel's apparent chaos. He suggests that if the novel itself is seen as the labyrinth and is understood as an attempt by the author to illustrate the complex nature of time, then it represents order instead of chaos. Albert also attempts to bring organization to the novel's perceived disorder. He remarks, "I have compared hundreds of manuscripts, corrected the errors introduced by careless copyists, guessed the plan of this chaos, and re-established...the original structure."

Albert essentially acts as the ideal reader of this text, bringing structure and clarity to what might otherwise seem nonsensical. Like a labyrinth that appears chaotic to someone without the right solution, the novel becomes, as Weissert puts it, "an ordered maze" once Albert discovers the key to understanding it.

Borges suggests that while the universe might seem chaotic and disordered, this chaos could actually reflect an order we have yet to understand. The difference between Yu Tsun's view of his ancestor's text as incoherent and Albert's view of it as ordered mirrors the human quest to find meaning in the seemingly random events of life.

“The Garden of Forking Paths” is a neat and clever detective story, but it also includes a theme of which Borges was very fond: the notion of multiple possibilities of an action. In science...