The Aleph

What is the author's style in The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges?

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The two epigraphs that precede "The Aleph" serve as introductions to the story's plot as well as short commentaries on its issues. The first, from Shakespeare's Hamlet, is said by the title character to his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: "O God! I could be bound in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space." Hamlet's meaning here is (as he later says), "There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so." By this logic, Hamlet argues that "Denmark's a prison." Here, however, Borges imagines Hamlet's lament literally: how might a man in a nutshell call himself "a King of infinite space?" Borges's story responds to (if not answers) this question through the idea of the Aleph, for its existence in the story forces the reader to consider the proposition that there are an infinite number of points in space and, therefore, that even a nutshell would contain an infinite number of points. This is perhaps why the Aleph in Daneri's basement is only an inch in diameter.

The second epigraph comes from Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and suggests the impossibility of understanding what "an Infinite greatness of Place" would be like. This impossibility, of course, is what the story attempts to address; the difficulty inherent in understanding infinity is discussed by Borges before he begins his description of what he saw in the Aleph.

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The Aleph