The Labyrinth of Life in The Garden of Forking Paths by Yu Tsun

The Labyrinth of Life in The Garden of Forking Paths by Yu Tsun

A labyrinth is classically a human construction designed to confuse. It can trap our lives, hiding our past and future and constantly forcing us to make choices, even though we may not know what the consequences of those choices might be. The confusion of the puzzle may even tempt us to run blindly through the labyrinth, ending in disaster. Life itself is often considered such a labyrinth, and by adopting the strategies of travelers who came before and choosing our path cautiously while playing close attention to the patterns of our lives, we may find the right path through the maze. Although the Labyrinth appears to be an intellectual challenge, every turn is accompanied by an ethical dilemma as well. 'The Garden of Forking Paths' is both an ethical and intellectual riddle. Consideration of Yu Tsun's intellectual choices must be accompanied by consideration of his ethical choices.

The most terrifying aspect of the garden of forking paths is that the ending of the maze is never in sight. Often, we are aware of only the obvious consequences of taking any particular turn, while the obscure consequences are rarely anticipated. As a result, we cannot be sure where the next turn will bring us until we have made the choice. An action of tremendous personal significance, such as Stephen Albert's murder, may have no greater consequences than a winning a battle in a war that the German's could possibly end up losing. Ts'ui Pên himself was murdered by a stranger before he had a chance to explain the nature of his labyrinth, while the current war was started by another homicidal stranger. The choices made by these men within their labyrinths have brought Yu Tsun to Stephen Albert's home, to become the stranger who will kill Albert. The action of the story seems inevitable, yet such inevitability is a deception. The path we have chosen may appear to be the only path that can be taken, but in reality, the possibilities are far more complex, as Albert explains that Ts'ui Pên ?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 . . .[where] time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures?(579).

If we could see consequences of each decision we made before forced to make the decision, taking...

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...ze. Furthermore, avoiding one hazard may cause us to fall subject to another. The labyrinth is infinite in size, and we are only aware of a very minute fraction, but contemplating too much on the unlived possibilities can cause us to be unaware of the present. However, to completely ignore these possibilities, and to ?imagine a future as irrecoverable as the past? (575) will leave us just as lost and trapped.

Every decision we make within our garden of forking paths opens up another set of possibilities, possibly leading us into another labyrinth. If we allow our ethical sense to become clouded, we may even find ourselves in a labyrinth of our own making, a maze where the compass points are lost and every decision only serves to trap us more securely. There will always be choices never made, turns never taken, discoveries lost forever to the twists and turns of fate. We will never discover the innumerable fates of our counterparts in Ts'ui Pên's endless series of possibilities.

Works Cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. ?The Garden of Forking Paths.? The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. J. Paul Hunter, Alison Booth,and Kelly J. Mays. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.