Book of Sand

1. The book had affected the narrator to a great extent. At first he did not care for the book, until the stranger selling Bibles said “the number of pages in this book is literally infinite. No page is the first page; no page is the last”. This intrigued the narrator’s mind. After he had bought the book, he began investigating. He noted down things in the book. He began losing sleep from the investigation and when he actually got sleep, his dreams were about the book. As it states in the short story, “At night, during the rare intervals spared me by insomnia, I dreamed of the book”. He had grown an obsession with the book, which altered his lifestyle and forced him to hide the book in the library.

2. The literary device that the author uses to compare the book and himself to was a metaphor. When the narrator said, “it was cold consolation to think that I, who looked upon it with my eye and fondled it with my ten flesh-and-bone fingers, was no less monstrous than the book”, this proved that he was comparing himself to the monstrous book. The meaning and significance of this metaphor states that he was no different from the book. His mind was now as dense and endless. The book carried infinite secrets and toyed with its readers. As it stated in the short story, “I felt it was a nightmare thing, an obscene thing, and that it defiled and corrupted reality”. The narrator felt that the deadly secrets that emanated from the book were all getting to his head. His fear of infinite evil caused him to hide the demonic book and run away from the eternal thoughts.

3. In the short story, “The Book of Sand” by Jorge Luis Borges, the narrator states that he had become a “prisoner of the book”. This is evidently shown when he obsessively investigates the book. He barely slept because all he could think about was the book, and he barely left his house. As it’s shown, “I had but few friends left, and those I stopped seeing. A prisoner of the book, I hardly left my house”. He