The Circular Ruins

Although the dreamer is the protagonist and the most fleshed-out character, he lacks depth. One reason for this is because “The Circular Ruins” is an allegory, or a narration of events in which characters, settings, and actions represent abstractions or ideas. The protagonist is a dream or an illusion himself, and as such, he is not a fully formed human being. He does not have memories or characteristics that the reader can analyze to better understand him.

The protagonist is motivated, although it is questionable whether this is of his own volition. When he arrives on the island, he is driven to accomplish his task of dreaming a man into being. He describes his obligation as one that absorbs every waking (and dreaming) moment: “This magical objective had come to fill his entire soul” (216). He is so fixated on his task that he neglects his basic needs to spend increasingly more time purposefully dreaming.

The dreamer is also self-absorbed, as much of his creation is tied to a sense of pride and accomplishment. When he starts trying to dream a man into being, he selects, out of all the countless, celestial pupils, a student that looks like himself: “[H]e dismissed the vast illusory classroom once and for all and retained but a single pupil—a taciturn, sallow-skinned young man, at times intractable, with sharp features that echoed those of the man that dreamed him” (218). Borges constructs this as a statement about the act of creation: Whether in biological reproduction or artistic endeavors, the creator will always imprint themselves on the new person or artwork.

The dreamer is also naive. He never questions why he is on the island with a magical objective. He assumes that things are as they are meant to be and trustingly puts his faith in Fire. This naivety ends in his concluding epiphany when he realizes that he is not a real man.