Yu Tsun reflects early in the story, “everything happens to a man precisely now. Widely anthologized, “The Garden of Forking Paths” continues to generate interest among scholars and students. This story is likely the most allegorical in Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths collection. The Garden of Forking Paths is a short story, written in 1941 by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges about a Chinese professor, Doctor Yu Tsun who is living in the United Kingdom during World War I. To omit a word always, to resort to inept metaphors and obvious periphrases, is perhaps the most emphatic way of stressing it. In fact, this theme in “The Garden of the Forking Paths” can also be termed a motif, simply because time is one of the main structures in the story and the concept of it recurs quite often throughout the text. The Garden of the Forking Paths: A Labyrinth of Time and Reality Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentinian writer whose works often played with the limits of time and space, of fantasy and reality, thus creating alternate and parallel universes in which all outcomes transpire. It is based on an article by Stuart Moulthrop (1991). This site is itself another adaptation of the same story. THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS Conceived as a “meta-garden,” a garden about gardens, Forking Paths derives its name from a story summarized here by Allen S. Weiss in his book Mirrors of Infinity: “Jorge Luis Borge’s story The Garden of Forking Paths is the tale of the great grandson of Ts’ui Pen, the Chinese governor of The Garden of Forking Paths Quotes Showing 1-14 of 14 “In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?” ― Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” he uses the genre of the detective story—a genre that requires clue-gathering and puzzle-solving—in order to explore the way time branches into an infinite number of futures. Whether “The Garden of Forking Paths” is a detective story, a fantasy, or a combination of the two is a question that, ultimately, each reader must decide for him or herself. In “The Garden of the Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges, one of the major themes is that of time and the possibilities it offers. Read online The Garden of Forking Paths (“El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”) by Jorge Luis Borges. 1. A LABYRINTH OF SYMBOLS EXPLORING ‘THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS’ w Ethan Weed INTRODUCTION N estled in the middle of J. L. Borges’ short story ”The Gar- den of Forking Paths” is the suggestion that a text, a work of fiction, can be a labyrinth. The obvious question, then, would be whether this story is a labyrinth. The Garden of Forking Paths. The idea for the site is not original. …” Likewise, Borges seems to be implying that the major theme of the short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” is also time. In this article Moulthrop describes his hypertextual adaptation of the short story by Jorge Luis Borges ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’. In the foreword to The Garden of Forking Paths, Borges says, "It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. “The Garden of Forking Paths is an enormous riddle, or parable, whose theme is time; this recondite cause prohibits its mention. Dr. Stephen Albert tells Yu Tsun, “The Garden of Forking Paths is an enormous riddle, or parable, whose theme is time. In "The Garden of Forking Paths", Borges refers to various unfinished works of literature to convey the idea of the limits of knowledge.