A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The Aleph"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The Aleph," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535835008

Book preview

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The Aleph

Jorge Luis Borges

1945

Introduction

In his 1969 study The Narrow Act: Borges's Art of Allusion, Ronald J. Christ offers an important piece of advice to anyone reading Borges for the first time: The point of origin for most of Borges's fiction is neither character nor plot … but, instead, as in science fiction, a proposition, an idea, a metaphor, which, because of its ingenious or fantastic quality, is perhaps best call[ed] a conceit. The Aleph certainly fits this description, for while it does possess the elements of traditional fiction, it is more concerned with exploring the conceit of infinity: if there were a point in space that contained all other points, and one could look at it, what would one see—and how would one describe what he or she saw to another person? Such are the questions raised by Borges's story.

The Aleph was first published in the Argentine journal Sur in 1945 and was included as the title work in the 1949 collection The Aleph. Like so many of Borges's other stories, essays, and poems, The Aleph is an attempt to explore and dramatize a philosophical or scientific riddle. To date, the story stands as one of Borges's most wellknown and representative works.

In a 1970 commentary on the story, Borges explained, What eternity is to time, the Aleph is to space. As the narrator of the story discovers, however, trying to describe such an idea in conventional terms can prove a daunting—even impossible—task.

Author Biography

Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires, one of Argentina's most famous cities. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was a lawyer; it was in his father's large library that the young Georgie (as he was called) discovered his love of reading. When Borges was a young boy, his family moved to Palermo, a suburb of Buenos Aires. Surprisingly, Borges did not begin attending school until he was nine years old. Because of the fear of tuberculosis, which was being transmitted at a deadly rate among schoolchildren, his mother, his English grandmother, and an English governess tutored him. Both English