SOURCE: “The Nature of Postmodern Time in Jorge Luis Borges's ‘Theme of the Traitor and Hero’ and Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Man Who Lies,” in The New Novel Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, Spring, 1997, pp. 50-65.

In the following essay, Fragola compares the concept of time in works by Borges and the French New Novelist, Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Alain Robbe-Grillet acknowledges that Jorge Luis Borges's short story “Theme of the Traitor and Hero” influenced him in making the 1968 film, The Man Who Lies (Fragola and Smith, 62). The most obvious connection lies in the theme of the double in the hero/traitor dichotomy that functions as the basic structure of both works, yet an equally important similarity can be found in their postmodern concept and manipulation of time. Ermarth identifies the subversion of historical time as one of the salient aspects of postmodernism. “The humanist construction of time is historical, and postmodern writing...