Analysis Of Miles Davis And Jorge Luis Borges's The Garden Of Forking Paths

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Music and literature are constantly evolving with each new release, but how ground breaking are these pieces compared to its contemporaries? Miles Davis and Jorge Luis Borges have contemplated and answered this question frequently. Rather than add on to a previous style, these two took the future of their genres into their own hands. In Davis’s “Kind of Blue” as well as Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,” old ideas are completely abandoned and new, inventive styles flourish. Not only do these two play with the content of their work, but they also explore different styles and means of composition. Both Davis and Borges experiment with new innovative ideas and concepts in their works successfully creating a unique style of their own. As …show more content…

In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Borges utilizes a rather labyrinthine style of writing. The story itself takes many forking paths, similar to those one would encounter in a labyrinth, splitting off into various digressions. These digressions eventually are resolved and loose ends are neatly tied up. For example, amid pondering various outcomes and motives combined with seemingly random interjections, Yu Tsun suddenly contemplates how to escape Madden once and for all (Borges 121-122). Eventually the reader discovers that his wandering thoughts are far more central to the story than first expected. Besides weighted words, Borges references various texts throughout his stories, both real and imaginary. He occasionally employs multiple narrators, seen in cited texts or footnotes. Borges makes these fictitious works more realistic by alternating how they are employed. He sometimes references the same work in multiple footnotes or short stories, or in case of “The Garden of Forking Paths,” he intertwines a legitimate work, History of the First World War by Liddell Hart, with a fictional statement given by Yu Tsun, with the first two pages conveniently missing (Borges 119). These invented works combined with a multitude of other allusions throughout the story lead readers down different paths of a textual labyrinth. These labyrinthine writing styles that Borges created as well as his …show more content…

Within “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Borges manifests new ideas of time, questions the standard understanding of a novel as well as contemplates the concept of fate. Time, one of Borges’s favorite topics, is easily manipulated. In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Borges attempts to make a visual model of an abstract idea. Adding to this, the title in itself is a metaphor to aid readers in imagining Ts’ui Pen’s idea of time - infinitely veering (Borges 126-127). Borges works Ts’ui Pen’s notion of time into a rather unique book that not only discusses the idea of time, but does it in a way that causes confusion and chaos among its readers. This textual labyrinth forks in time rather than space, creating infinite futures with completely different outcomes (Borges 125). Through these infinitely different futures, Borges brings up his ideas of fate. By actions and thoughts, it is made obvious that the protagonist is a firm believer in fate, saying “the future is as irrevocable as the past” (Borges 121). All the seemingly unrelated events in his life - Captain Madden, his arrival at Dr. Albert’s house, and the novel itself - all appear to come together for a single purpose, for Yu Tsun to signal where the artillery park was located. This combination of themes had rarely been written about before, leaving Borges as the creator of new

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