Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

Published 1962 · 89,894 words · about 14 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Essays

How hard is Labyrinths to read?

Labyrinths scores 83 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 78 out of 100
Borges deploys an erudite philosophical and theological register throughout — gnostic heresies, cabalistic numerology, Averroism, nominalism, Scholastic metaphysics — alongside invented proper nouns (Tlön, Uqbar, Hrönir) that require readers to hold unfamiliar concepts in suspension. The translations preserve a formal, slightly archaic English that elevates the vocabulary above contemporary literary fiction without reaching the invented portmanteau density of Joyce or the specialized technical jargon of Melville.
Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
Borges' sentences are controlled and lapidary rather than maximally complex — he favors clarity as a vehicle for paradox, not syntactic obscurity. The essays construct careful subordination with embedded clauses, while the stories frequently pivot on a single declarative sentence that overturns everything preceding it. Footnotes and parenthetical asides function as secondary narrative layers, demanding attention to typography as meaning, but the core sentences rarely exceed Proustian depth.
Abstraction: 87 out of 100
Concrete sensory experience is almost entirely absent from Labyrinths — Borges gives readers labyrinths, libraries, and mirrors as philosophical propositions, not physical spaces. The Library of Babel is a sustained meditation on infinity and epistemological despair; A New Refutation of Time is a philosophical treatise barely disguised as an essay; even the detective story Death and the Compass functions as an allegory for the dangers of imposing pattern on chaos. This places the collection at the threshold of The Waiting for Godot level of pervasive abstraction.
Information density: 85 out of 100
Each piece in Labyrinths operates as a compressed argument that packs Berkeley's idealism, encyclopedia hoaxes, ontological paradox, and literary-historical allusion into 5-15 pages. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius alone contains a complete philosophy of knowledge, a history of a fictional world, and a meditation on how ideas colonize reality. Readers who miss the Zeno reference or the Leibniz allusion lose structural load-bearing beams. Re-reading is not optional but designed in.
Narrative indirection: 87 out of 100
Borges never states his themes — he enacts them. The Shape of the Sword is a confession whose speaker is concealed until the final sentence. Three Versions of Judas presents heretical theology as straight scholarship before the narrator's own complicity emerges. Pierre Menard requires the reader to hold the ironic framing constant across an entire mock-critical essay. Meaning arrives only when readers decode the gap between the story's surface claim and its actual argument.
Symbolic density: 91 out of 100
The labyrinth, the library, the mirror, and the encyclopedia are not merely recurring images but fully operational symbols that carry the philosophical weight of each narrative. The Garden of Forking Paths uses its garden-as-novel-as-time-theory structure to embody infinite bifurcation, not describe it. Funes the Memorious literalizes total recall as a parable of the impossibility of thought. Everything in Borges doubles as something else — the ratio of symbol to literal event is among the highest in literary fiction.
Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
Borges deploys the register of academic scholarship — footnotes, bibliographic entries, citations of invented authorities — to advance fictional arguments with complete deadpan seriousness. Pierre Menard is the purest instance: a reviewer praises a word-for-word recreation of Don Quixote as richer than the original, and the logic holds. The irony is intellectual and structural rather than satirical, requiring readers to maintain constant awareness that the scholarly apparatus is itself the joke and the argument simultaneously.
Resolution withholding: 86 out of 100
Borges' endings characteristically open outward rather than close. The Circular Ruins concludes when the dreamer realizes he is himself being dreamed — no resolution, only infinite regress. The Library of Babel posits that meaning may be unreachable for the species collectively. The Zahir ends in mental dissolution and the narrator's anticipation of his own erasure. These are not ambiguous endings in the way of realism — they are conclusions that structurally prevent closure.
Structural complexity: 80 out of 100
Labyrinths is formally radical in ways that resist easy categorization: the same text may be a short story, an essay, a parody of scholarship, and a philosophical argument simultaneously. Footnotes become plot; fictional bibliographies become evidence; fake prefaces frame invented histories. The collection itself is organized as a labyrinth — echoes and reflections between stories create a secondary layer of meaning visible only across multiple pieces. This formal experimentation is more radical in its genre-blurring than the timeline-jumping of conventional postmodern fiction.

How Labyrinths is regarded

Labyrinths holds a literary regard score of 94 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Labyrinths sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (180 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Labyrinths scores 92 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
Hladik, more insignificant than pitiable, sat down on a pile of wood.
Symbol: Anagogic
The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.
Mythos: Irony/Satire vi (irony vi)
With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.
Genre: Anatomy + Romance
Rather than write a whole book, which would bore him, he analyzes a book which has never existed.

Where the story of Labyrinths takes place

  • Buenos Aires and the River Plate, 1884-1948 (Funes, Emma Zunz, The Zahir, Death and the Compass) (1884 to 1948), the main setting
  • Roman Egypt and the City of the Immortals through to the Eritrean coast, 1921 (285 to 1929)
  • Late-antique Aquileia and Pannonia, the Theologians (450 to 560)
  • Almohad Córdoba, Averroes' house (1180 to 1198)
  • Aztec-era prison under Alvarado, The God's Script (1520 to 1524)
  • Staffordshire, England, WWI spy plot, July 1916
  • Connaught, Ireland, war of independence, 1922-23 (1922 to 1923)
  • Adrogué, Ramos Mejía and the spread of Tlön, 1937-1944 (1937 to 1944)
  • Nazi-occupied Prague, March 1943
  • The Library of Babel and the House of Asterion, outside time

5 things that are true of Labyrinths, with the passage for each

  1. Yu Tsun kills Dr. Stephen Albert only so that his name will reveal the city Berlin must bomb.

    I had found no other means to do so than to kill a man of that name.

  2. Pierre Menard's Quixote is word-for-word identical to Cervantes' yet judged almost infinitely richer.

    Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer.

  3. Each book in the Library of Babel has 410 pages, each page 40 lines, and each shelf holds 35 books.

    each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines

  4. The Englishman of La Colorada, who tells the story of the scar, turns out to be the traitor himself.

    I denounced the man who protected me: I am Vincent Moon. Now despise me.

  5. Jaromir Hladik is shot at 9:02 a.m. on 29 March, after a year of thought granted inside a single instant.

    Jaromir Hladik died on March 29, at 9:02 A.M.

Scenes in Labyrinths that Frye would name

67 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another. The magician recognises that he is himself a dreamed phantom, pivoting the whole story.
Anagnorisis, untitled
I denounced the man who protected me: I am Vincent Moon. Now despise me. The narrator reveals himself as the traitor he has been describing.
Pathos, untitled
Jaromir Hladik died on March 29, at 9:02 A.M. The execution scene, with the dying man's year of invisible work completed.
Katabasis, untitled
in the rear was a pit, in the pit a stairway which sank down abysmally into the darkness below. The tribune descends into the nine-doored cellars beneath the City of the Immortals.
Anagnorisis, untitled
he and John of Pannonia (the orthodox believer and the heretic, the abhorrer and the abhorred, the accuser and the accused) formed one single person. Paradise reveals the two enemy theologians to be one person.
Point of epiphany, untitled
I saw an exceedingly high Wheel, which was not before my eyes, nor behind me, nor to the sides, but every place at one time. Union with the divinity from the prison floor is the book's clearest meeting of two worlds.

Books that share these scenes with Labyrinths

About the author

Jorge Luis Borges