The South By Jorge Luis Borges

“The South” by Jorge Luis Borges portrays the life of Juan Dahlmann, a librarian from Buenos Aires, wherein a sequence of unfortunate events brings him, eventually and triumphantly, to the South. But the story might be as mundane as Dahlmann’s northern life without its stunning conclusion: rather than living happily in the South like he’s always longed for, Dahlmann willingly dies the first night he gets there. Dahlmann dies just before his promised life can even begin, yet he finds joy in it. His bizarre mindset, then, demands explanation and exploration. Dahlmann, in fact, in his journey falsely sees the sustenance of his romantic, “profoundly Argentine” dream—courage and freedom—in the savagery and resignation of the real South, thereby
After escaping narrowly from death, Dahlmann goes on a train ride heading to the South. Though the vacation is intended as a break from his old life, Dahlmann can’t seem to truly escape his memory. He is “two men at once”: while physically free and “gliding along through the autumn day”, Dahlmann is mentally trapped and reliving the horror of being “imprisoned in a sanatorium” (Borges 26). The astonishing duality of Dahlmann’s character indicates his alarming mental detachment from the physical reality and foreshadows the duality of the ensuing narrative. As Dahlmann almost realizes himself, “he was traveling not only into the South but into the past”: Dahlmann, being so engrossed in his mind and detached from the reality, superimposes his past and his dream of the South with the real South. His experience in the South, then, is (partially) imaginary and constructed from his dream, which in conjunction with the reality gives rise to a fantastic duality of the South. This fantastic South, a place of interplay between reality and fiction, is exactly where the story takes place. Often the reality and Dahlmann’s conception are aligned, almost as if the story takes place entirely within Dahlmann’s imagination, e.g., when Dahlmann enters a store that looks like his own red house and meets its owner whom he mistakes for an employee at the sanatorium. Nevertheless, his encounter with the gaucho exemplifies the duality clearly: though the gaucho is in reality weak and meek, as discussed earlier, Dahlmann is “warmed by the rightness of the man’s hairband, the baize poncho he wore” (Borges 27). He is “warmed” by the “rightness of the man” since he projects onto the real gaucho, or rather the gaucho’s appearance and clothing, his own conception of romantic gauchos and is then glad to have finally confirmed their existence (self-deceivingly). Indeed,