A Comprehensive Analysis of Literary Protagonists - Ievgen Sykalo 2026

Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote - “Ficciones” by Jorge Luis Borges

The Paradox of Absolute Duplication

The most striking contradiction of Pierre Menard is that he seeks the pinnacle of artistic originality through the act of absolute duplication. In Jorge Luis Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, we are introduced to a character whose ambition is not to create something new, but to arrive at the exact same words as Miguel de Cervantes by following a completely different path. This is not a project of plagiarism or transcription; it is an act of intellectual asceticism. Menard does not want to copy Don Quixote; he wants to be the author of Don Quixote, stripped of the historical accident of being Cervantes.

This pursuit reveals a character defined by a specific, manic kind of discipline. While most writers struggle with the blank page, Menard struggles with a page that is already full. His conflict is not with the narrative of the novel, but with his own 20th-century consciousness. To produce a text identical to the original, he must first erase everything that makes him a modern man—his knowledge of the subsequent centuries of literature, his French upbringing, his contemporary philosophy. The internal struggle of Pierre Menard is therefore a battle of subtraction. He attempts to perform a psychological alchemy, transforming himself into a 17th-century Spaniard so that the words of the Quixote may emerge from him not as a memory, but as a discovery.

The Psychology of the Intellectual Ascetic

The Will to Disappear

To understand Pierre Menard, one must distinguish between the act of copying and the act of recreating. Copying is a passive exercise in mimicry; recreation, in Menard's vision, is an active exercise of the will. Menard views the original Quixote as a product of Cervantes' specific circumstances. For Menard to achieve the same result, he believes he must recreate those circumstances within his own mind. This requires a level of cognitive dissonance that borders on the pathological. He is not merely writing a book; he is attempting to inhabit a ghost.

This drive suggests a character who finds the traditional notion of "creativity" insufficient. For Menard, the "new" is a cliché. He finds a deeper, more perverse form of novelty in the identical. There is a profound arrogance in this approach—the belief that the human mind can be so precisely calibrated that it can replicate the exact output of another soul across centuries. Menard is not seeking to honor Cervantes; he is seeking to supersede him by proving that the text is independent of the man. He treats the act of writing as a mathematical or chemical formula that can be solved if the variables are correctly aligned.

The Agony of the Process

The text describes the "existential agony" of Menard's task. This agony stems from the impossibility of the goal. No matter how deeply he immerses himself in the culture of Golden Age Spain, he cannot truly un-know the world. Every word he writes is haunted by the fact that it already exists. This creates a psychological tension where Menard is simultaneously the creator and the critic, the author and the reader. He is trapped in a loop of hyper-awareness, where the effort required to produce a "simple" sentence becomes a Herculean labor because it must be arrived at "honestly" rather than copied.

Menard as the Meta-Protagonist

In the traditional sense, Pierre Menard is a static character. He has no traditional arc; he does not evolve, fail, or find redemption in a way that drives a plot. Instead, he functions as a philosophical catalyst. He is a protagonist of the mind, whose only "action" is the internal labor of thought. Borges uses him to dismantle the romanticized image of the author as a unique genius. By making Menard's "original" work identical to Cervantes', Borges suggests that the meaning of a text does not reside in the words themselves, but in the context of the reader.

Menard embodies the idea that a text is a living organism that changes depending on who writes it and when it is read. When Cervantes wrote, "In a village of La Mancha...", he was creating a narrative. When Menard writes the same sentence, he is commenting on the very nature of narrative. The character of Menard is the bridge between the act of writing and the act of interpretation. He proves that the most radical act a writer can perform is not to invent a new world, but to re-contextualize an existing one.

The Parallel of Delusion

There is a profound symmetry between Menard and the character of Don Quixote himself. Both are men who retreat from a reality they find unsatisfying into a constructed world of their own making. While Quixote reads too many chivalric romances and decides he is a knight-errant, Menard reads too much Cervantes and decides he can be the author of the Quixote. Both suffer from a form of "literary madness" where the boundary between fiction and life collapses.

The Erasure of Authorship

The ultimate function of Pierre Menard is to serve as a vehicle for the concept of intertextuality. Through Menard, Borges argues that no text exists in a vacuum. The "original" Quixote is a product of the 17th century; Menard's Quixote is a product of the 20th. Because the words are identical but the histories are different, the meanings are fundamentally different. Menard’s version is, in the narrator's estimation, "richer" because it carries the weight of all the literature that came after Cervantes.

This transforms Menard from a mere eccentric into a symbol of the modern condition. He represents the transition from the era of the Author (the singular creator) to the era of the Reader (the active producer of meaning). Menard does not write a book; he creates a reading experience. He demonstrates that the "meaning" of a work is not a fixed entity deposited by the author into the text, but a fluid interaction between the words and the historical moment of the audience.

In this light, Menard's obsession is not a waste of time, but a profound insight into the nature of art. He recognizes that we are all, in a sense, rewriting the works we have read. Every time we interpret a poem or analyze a novel, we are producing a version of that work that is unique to our own time and place. Pierre Menard simply takes this unconscious process and turns it into a rigorous, lifelong project. He is the patron saint of the remix, the translator, and the critic—anyone who understands that the only way to truly engage with a masterpiece is to attempt to rebuild it from the inside out.

Ultimately, Menard is a character who disappears into his own work. By the end of the analysis, the man himself matters less than the paradox he represents. He is a ghost in the machine of literature, a reminder that the act of creation is often an act of remembering, and that the most profound originality may lie in the courage to be exactly like someone else, for entirely different reasons.

Written by

S.Y.A.

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