He visits her family on her birthday to pay his respects, a practice he intends to repeat annually. Stricken by fear that time and nature will simply move on from her, Borges determines to consecrate himself to her. It starts with the death of Beatriz Viterbo, the narrator’s friend and love interest, who faced her mortal illness with dignity.
The story is narrated in first person by a fictionalized version of the author, implementing a literary device called autofiction. The story begins with epigraphs from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space”) and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (“But they will teach us that Eternity is the Standing still of the Present Time, a Nunc-stans (as the Schools call it) which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they would a Hic-stans for an Infinite greatness of place”) (118). This guide refers to the Penguin Classics edition of the story translated by Andrew Hurley and released in 1998.
0 kommentar(er)
