Part One, The Garden of Forking Paths, An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain Summary

Herbert Quain has just died and the newspaper has printed only a small obituary for the occasion. However, the narrator believes that Quain deserves to be heralded a genius in his obituaries. Quain was a modest man, however, and would not have liked a lot of fuss over his death. The narrator believes that Quain's works were genius, that he hid secondary meaning in his first novel. The first novel, a detective novel, actually had two solutions, one that was obvious to the reader and the detective within the novel, and another that was less obvious but more profound.

The narrator writes in detail about Quain's other novel, April March. April March contains a different...