A Comprehensive Analysis of Literary Protagonists - Ievgen Sykalo 2026

Jorge Luis Borges - “Ficciones” by Jorge Luis Borges

The Paradox of the Human Idea

To seek a traditional psychological portrait of a character in Ficciones is to engage in a category error. Jorge Luis Borges does not populate his stories with people in the conventional sense; instead, he populates them with intellectual apertures. A character in a Borgesian narrative is rarely a bundle of desires, traumas, or social aspirations. Instead, they are the specific point of consciousness required to witness a metaphysical paradox. The tension in these works arises not from the conflict between two personalities, but from the friction between a human mind and an infinite or contradictory reality.

The characters are often scholars, detectives, or dreamers—roles that prioritize observation over action. While a traditional protagonist drives the plot through choice and will, the Borgesian protagonist is often a passenger to a revelation. They do not change the world; they discover that the world is a library, a labyrinth, or a dream. This shift transforms the nature of characterization: the "arc" is not one of moral growth or psychological maturation, but of epistemic collapse. The character begins with a hypothesis and ends with a vertigo-inducing realization that their identity is a fiction, a repetition, or a mathematical necessity.

The Scholar as a Vessel for Obsession

The most recurring archetype in Ficciones is the Scholar—the man whose entire existence is subsumed by a single, often impossible, intellectual pursuit. For Borges, obsession is the only authentic human trait. Psychological depth is replaced by the depth of a character's research. In stories like The Library of Babel or Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the characters function as conduits for encyclopedic mania. They are defined not by who they are, but by what they seek to catalog.

The Erasure of the Self through Knowledge

In these narratives, the pursuit of knowledge does not empower the character; it erases them. The more the character understands the vastness of the system they inhabit, the more insignificant their individual identity becomes. This is a deliberate artistic choice. By stripping away the "noise" of personality—hobbies, family ties, emotional volatility—Borges allows the character to become a pure philosophical instrument. The scholar's struggle is not against an antagonist, but against the limits of human cognition. Their "conflict" is the realization that the universe is too large to be mapped, yet they are biologically compelled to try.

The Detective of the Abstract

Even when Borges employs the trappings of a genre—such as the espionage plot in The Garden of Forking Paths—the character remains an abstraction. The narrator's role as a spy is merely a skeletal frame for a deeper investigation into the nature of time. The character's primary relationship is not with his fellow agents or his enemies, but with the text of the labyrinth. The "action" of the story is a process of decoding. Here, the character is an extension of the reader: a figure attempting to find a pattern in a chaotic sequence of events, only to find that the pattern is a recursive loop.

The Double and the Dissolution of Identity

If the Scholar represents the drive toward knowledge, the Double represents the fragility of the "I." Borges uses characters to explore the terrifying possibility that identity is not unique, but repeatable. This is most evident in the figure of Pierre Menard in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Menard is not a character in the sense of having a backstory or a personality; he is a literary experiment personified.

Menard’s goal—to write Don Quixote not by copying it, but by becoming the man who would write it—collapses the distinction between the author and the subject. Menard ceases to be an individual and becomes a medium. Through him, Borges explores the idea that the meaning of a text changes based on the identity of the reader/writer. The "character" of Menard is therefore a mirror; he exists only to reflect the philosophy of intertextuality. He is a man who has successfully deleted his own ego to make room for another's ghost.

This dissolution is mirrored in The Circular Ruins, where the protagonist’s internal conflict is the ultimate metaphysical horror: the discovery that he is not the creator of a dream-man, but is himself a dream being dreamed by another. The character's journey is a circle. The psychological portrait here is one of ontological instability. The character does not "travel" from point A to point B; he discovers that point A and point B are the same point in a recursive loop of existence.

The Functional Divergence of Character

To understand why Borges eschews traditional development, it is helpful to compare his approach with the standards of the realist novel. In a realist work, character is destiny; in Ficciones, the concept is destiny.

The Architecture of the Mind as Setting

In most literature, the setting is a backdrop for the character. In Ficciones, the setting is often the dominant personality, and the character is merely a guest within it. The characters are defined by the geometry of their surroundings. Whether it is the hexagonal galleries of the Library or the bifurcating paths of a garden, the environment dictates the character's mental state. The Labyrinth is not just a place; it is the psychological condition of the characters.

This relationship suggests that for Borges, the human mind is itself a labyrinth. The characters do not explore physical spaces so much as they explore the topography of thought. Their movements through a physical maze are metaphors for their attempts to resolve a logical paradox. Consequently, their "personality" is a reflection of the logic of the space they occupy. A character in a circular world thinks in circles; a character in a world of infinite books thinks in permutations. The character is a variable in a mathematical equation, and their function is to solve for X.

The Metaphysical Weight of Silence

Finally, the effectiveness of Borges' characters lies in what is omitted. There is a profound economy of emotion in Ficciones. We rarely learn about a character's childhood, their romantic failures, or their private fears. This silence is not a lack of skill, but a precise surgical removal of the irrelevant. By stripping away the "human" clutter, Borges elevates the character to the level of a mythic symbol.

The characters become timeless because they are not anchored to a specific social reality. They are citizens of the Universal Library. Their struggle is the struggle of every conscious being: the attempt to find meaning in a universe that may be a random sequence of letters or a dream of a sleeping god. The "depth" of a Borges character is found not in their psyche, but in the shadow they cast across the philosophical questions they provoke. They are the masks that Borges wears to ask the reader: Who is dreaming whom?

Written by

S.Y.A.

Literature educator and essay writing specialist. Over 20 years of experience creating educational content for students and teachers.