The Circular Ruins

Despite providing detailed descriptions throughout the story, “The Circular Ruins” does not establish where or when the tale takes place. The dreamer is on an island with a tropical climate, and there are ruins, but there is no way to tell what island it is or where it could be. In a similar manner, few identifying details are provided for the protagonist. Borges does not specify a nationality or ethnicity for the dreamer—he is just described as “gray.”

By keeping the setting and the main character nebulous, almost surreal, Borges cements the story in a place that is “other” without being unrealistic. It allows the author to transcend distracting details to focus on existential questions.

Diction is word choice, or an intentional selection of vocabulary that affects the text’s meaning. As an Ultraist, Borges carefully selected specific words with particular intentions. Some of the author’s diction is lost in translation, as he wrote “The Circular Ruins” in Spanish. In an interview, Borges emphasized that certain words have meaning in one language that cannot be translated effectively. For example, he explained that the Argentine Spanish word for “awaken” is recordarse. The author noted that recordarse does not have the same nuances of meaning when translated into other languages (Burgin, Richard. Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations. University Press of Mississippi, 1998). Nonetheless, the impact of Borges’s diction is mostly retained in translation. For example, the description of the dreamer’s canoe sinking into “sacred mud” at the beginning of the story encapsulates the mystical and religious undertones of the entire narrative.

An allusion is a reference to something outside of the text (with which the reader is presumably familiar) in order to impart additional meaning or significance. Borges uses many obscure religious references in “The Circular Ruins.” While allusions usually help cement a story in a time or place, these references are intentionally confusing in the story, helping to construct a pseudo-surrealist setting.

The first example of this technique is in the explanation that the gray man came from: “where the language of the Zend is uncontaminated by Greek and where leprosy is uncommon” (214). Although those are highly specific allusions, they do not call to mind a particular place, regardless of how familiar the reader might be with ancient proto-Christian sects. Borges creates this obscuring effect purposefully, building the cognitive dissonance necessary to make his story feel real.