1. Ts’ui Pên’s story is built around a paradox—that one can simultaneously make multiple choices with different outcomes—but this is not the only paradox or contradiction in the story. Look back through the story and find at lest two other examples of apparent paradox. Speculate as to their significance. Why did Borges put them there?
2. Borges explicitly called “The Garden of Forking Paths” a detective story. How does the story fulfill and/or contradict the reader’s expectations based on this genre? What is the reader’s typical role in a detective story? Does this parallel any of the characters’ roles in the story? Why might this be significant?
3. Conflicts and discrepancies in language are also built into the story’s very core. The narrator is Chinese, but working for Germans in England, and the key text to which the story refers is also written in Chinese. (This is not even mentioning the problems of accurate copying and reporting of events, which are also brought up multiple times in the story.) Further, we are reading Borges’ story in translation. What is Borges’s attitude toward language, meaning, and translation? Is there a point or a moral to this motif?
4. Nearly all of today’s blog posts mentioned the idea of fate. However, I think Borges is getting at something deeper than fate: causation. Select a couple of events in the story—it doesn’t really matter whether they are important or apparently insignificant—and try to trace back the trail of events that led to or caused them. What does Borges’s story seem to say about the nature of causation? What is the relationship between causation and fate?
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