Explore "Afterword" by Jorge Luis Borges on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
AfterwordPrefacing stories a reader has not yet read, since it demands the analysis of plots that it may be inconvenient to deal with in advance, is a somewhat impossible task. I therefore prefer an afterword.
The book's first story takes up the old theme of the double, which several times moved Robert Louis Stevenson's ever-fortunate pen. In England, its name is ‘fetch' or, more bookishly, ‘wraith of the living'; in Germany, ‘Doppelgänger'. One of its earliest names, I suspect, was mirrors of metal or from reflections in water or simply from memory, which makes of anyone both a spectator and an actor. In ‘The Other', I had to ensure that the speakers were sufficiently different to be two persons and alike enough to be one. Is it worth stating that the idea for the story came to me in Cambridge on the banks of the Charles River, whose cold course reminded me of the far-off course of the Rhone?