I just read this story, and I really loved it; it reminded me of something like Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, but condensed to 10 pages.
Anyway, I have a quesiton about the ending. The story’s been available for 50+ years, so I don’t see the need for spoiler boxes.
Recap: The basic gist is that our protagonist is on the trail of a series of murders that all conform to a series of clues that lead him to calculate where the fourth murder will take place. He goes to surprise the murderer, but he’s been tricked; the whole thing was a setup so that his nemesis could trap him and kill him. But the story’s “punchline,” so to speak, is that he strikes a bargain with his nemesis/killer; “Next time we’re reincarnated and this happens, plot the murders so that they occur in a straight line. Murder B should take place 8km from Murder A, Murder C should take place 4km from Murder B, and the fourth murder should take place 2km from there; each murder should take place at half the distance from the previous murder.” (paraphrased)
I have a feeling that there’s something about this that I’m not quite getting - what’s the punchline, so to speak? Has the protag somehow tricked his nemesis with this arrangement? That’s the vibe that I get, but I can’t put my finger on it.
I haven’t read the story, but it sounds to me like Zeno’s paradox. If the murderer is always taking one-half of the previous distance, then he’ll continue to do so infinitely and never reach the destination.
Zeno’s paradoxes are one of the many themes that Borges harbours a nigh-on obsession for. He deals explicity with the paradoxes in his essay Avatars of the Tortoise, and allusions to them appear in a number of his other stories. You might read it as asking that the chase go on forever, and thus the final confrontation never arrive.
On a semi-related note, I recently read one critic (I’ll need to check out the library when I’m at university later today to find his name) who devoted a great deal of time to examining the story, and postulated one possible argument that the protagonist and the villain of Death… are in fact the same person. He supported this by mentioning that the last part of the Lonnrot’s name translates from German as “red” (the name of the villain is Red Scharlach) and that Scharlach possesses knowledge that only the protagonist and the omnipresent narrator should. Also, on the one occasion that the reader really “sees” Scharlach he’s wearing a mask. The final confrontation occurs in a house that “abounded in pointless symmetries and maniacal repetitions”, decorated with a “two-faced Hermes”, in which he was “multiplied infinately in opposing mirrors” and was made larger by “the symmetry, the mirrors, so many years, my unfamiliarity, the loneliness”.
I’m not sure how much credence to put in the claim, or what other Borges readers would make of it, but it certainly adds another interesting layer to a story that’s already so thought-provoking.
(Of course, Borges might argue that the hero, the villain, the reader and the writer of the story are all one-and-the-same, and that the story serves as an act of self-duplicity and a meditation on the fictionality of life, but I’m getting ahead of myself here…)
yes! That’s exactly what I thought when I finished FP: “Didn’t Borges already do this, and in just ten pages?” The themes of both were theories that existed in the minds of the protagonists but took on a life of their own due to the force of the protagonists belief.