Idealism in Two Stories from The Book of Sand

everal recent studies on Borges have explored the many philosophical motifs that he employs in his short stories.1 This philosophical reading seems to be justified by a number of Borges’ own statements about both his biography and his work. For example, in the Preface to The Gold of the Tigers (1972), he refers to his “philosophical preoccupation” which he says “has been with [him] since [his] childhood.”2 Not only does he frequently mention specific philosophers and philosophical doctrines, but he also exploits such doctrines in the actual content of the stories themselves, in this way making use of philosophical ideas in otherwise literary texts. Thus, while some, indeed perhaps most, readers see his stories merely as examples of a fiction of fantasy, others see them as thought experiments based on philosophical premises.