Response to “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges

(First I need to apologize for this post being late, I misread the course schedule)

How does the story problematize the seeming authority and truth of a history book? What is history according to this story? What is the relationship between history and fiction? How are they similar? How do they differ?

From what I understand about the story, the main idea is that there are many (who know exactly how many?) different universes based off of what choices are made. You make a choice in a situation, and so you are know in that universe that you made that choice. So, with that in mind, our concept of history are the choices that lead us to the universe that we’re currently in, the one we continue to change as we make millions of choices. History is “true” to us because it’s our truth, what lead us to where we are now. Our history isn’t the truth for alternate universes, however, where different decisions were made. With this being established, history and fiction are both similar and different. They differ in that, as I said, our history are the series of choices that brought us here to where we are now, made us live and placed us wherever we are in the world. They are similar because a work of fiction has its own history too, within it and “behind the scenes,” per say. The events of fiction is just a physically tangible example of what we go through unknowingly on a daily basis: the a universe in which certain events happen instead of others. So, history and fiction? Both the same and not. It all depends on who (and where) you’re asking.