A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," 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 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535830904

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Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

Jorge Luis Borges

1939

Introduction

Jorge Luis Borges wrote the story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote in 1939, soon after suffering a serious accident. Borges had until then been primarily a poet and the author of journalistic and critical articles, with little experience in writing short stories. However, after a fall on a staircase that resulted in a head injury, Borges attempted to reassure himself that the accident had not caused the loss of his writing ability, later telling an interviewer, I thought I’d try my hand at something I hadn’t done. Pierre Menard appeared in the spring 1939 issue of the magazine Sur. With it Borges commenced his production of the stories, or fictions as he called them, which influenced much twentieth-century fiction.

Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, like the other fictions The Aleph, and Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, utilizes the voice of an academic narrator, well-versed in the discussion of obscure details of the literary life of many nations. The story is written in the style of a literary article in an academic French journal. The narrator purports to rectify a number of errors committed by another academic in recording the career of the writer Pierre Menard. According to the narrative, Menard had resolved to write Don Quixote: not to copy the story down as it exists in the version by Miguel de Cervantes, but to arrive at the conditions necessary to write exactly the same story through his own experiences. The narrator compares identical passages from Menard’s Quixote and that of Cervantes, concluding that Menard’s is far superior. Borges’s story, similarly, is doubled: although Borges is clearly