In a brief aside, Tsun’s narration explains that he performs his espionage not to support Germany but to prove a point the Chief seems prejudiced against the Chinese, and Tsun wants to show him that an Asian can be competent and valorous. Stephen Albert (the reader also eventually learns just why Tsun has zeroed in on this name). Tsun embarks on a plan after locating in the telephone directory “the name of the one person capable of passing on the information” (213), a man whom the reader soon learns is named Dr. He needs to convey this information to his handler, the Chief, while eluding Madden, who closes in after killing Tsun’s associate, Runeberg. Tsun possesses vital intelligence: the location of a British artillery park. Tsun knows when he hears Madden’s voice that Runeberg has been captured or killed, setting into motion Tsun’s desperate actions to follow. Madden speaks with Tsun from the apartment of Tsun’s ally Viktor Runeberg, a German agent.
Tsun’s first-person narration starts with a description of the phone call-a conversation in German with English agent Captain Richard Madden, Tsun’s nemesis. The first paragraph of the excerpt begins mid-sentence-“…and I hung up the phone” (212)-emphasizing the introduction’s acknowledgement that two pages of the confession are missing from Liddell Hart’s account.
The rest of the story is set in England and comes in the form of Tsun’s fictional deposition, taken as he awaited execution. The book and its author exist in the world outside “The Garden of Forking Paths” Captain Liddell Hart was a famed British soldier and strategist whose chronicle The Real War was reprinted as A History of the World War (1914-1918). Yu Tsun-Chinese professor of English, a spy for Germany, and the story’s main character-explains the reasons for postponing a July 1916 British offensive against German troops at Serre-Montauban. According to Captain Hart, this testimony from Dr. The opening paragraph claims the main text to be a transcript of a deposition included in a book called A History of the World War by Captain Liddell Hart. The story begins by identifying itself as an artifact and a fragment. In many of Borges’s stories, the author includes fictional dates, places, and bibliographical support in order to question our understanding of reality and to destabilize our assumptions about the past in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” such ancillary textual features refer to both historical and imaginary people and events. This version includes the author’s dedication to his friend and fellow writer Victoria Ocampo, as well as the framing introduction and footnote.
This guide refers to the version of “The Garden of Forking Paths” anthologized in The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories, edited by Roberto González Echevarría (1999) and translated by Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd.
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