The Library of Babel is a short story written by Jorge Luis Borges. Released in 1941, it is the seventh short story in Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths and tells of an infinite library.
Characters[]
- The narrator
Plot[]
Our narrator is an inhabitant of our Library whose life is soon to end from old age. According to him, his universe is the titular Library - an infinite series of hexagonal rooms connected by stairs and containing four walls of bookshelves with twenty shelves (five in four of the walls) with thirty-two books of four hundred and ten pages which have forty lines which are comprised of eighty black letters. These books are comprised of seemingly random combinations of twenty-five orthographic characters (the twenty-two letters of the alphabet along with commas and periods). Due to the extreme size of the Library and the nature of random chance, most of these books are gibberish though many have legible sentences within them and a few are complete (or near-complete) works. None of these books are identical, though there are many works which are presumably nearly identical. Due to this, the narrator postulates that the Library must contain within its shelves versions of all the knowledge outside and inside of it - texts which accurately predict the future and texts which inaccurately predict it, biographies of people real and fictional, and translations of every book (which can be fit evenly into 410 pages or multiples of that) in any language.
Inhabiting the Library is a group of librarians of unknown origin (who include the narrator within their number) who search through the shelves seeking for their "Vindication" until their death (after which they are thrown down the staircases to fall infinitely). For an unknown amount of time longer than five hundred years, these narrators have shifted through the shelves seeking for meaning within the Library. According to legend, there was once a librarian who found a book which brings meaning to the Library but (if this librarian even existed) they vanished without a trace beyond a few librarians who believe in their existence and worship them as "the Man of the Book". Another group within the Library are the "Purifiers". These are a group of fanatics who burn entire shelves on finding gibberish books (though the narrator states that the losses due to this are minimal due to the infinite nature of the shelves) in search of a mythical location known as the "Crimson Hexagon" which contains smaller volumes filled with illustrations. Though both of these orders exist, there are also a growing number of librarians who succumb to hopelessness at finding anything and kill themselves - in fact, the narrator says that the humans living in the library are approaching extinction while "the Library will last on forever".
See also[]
- The Universal Library by Kurd Lasswitz
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Sources[]
- Wikipedia