Blog Number 8

For blog number 8 here, I would like to discuss Borges' short story "The South". Specifically I would like to point out the issue of choice and decisions. The first time reading the story I simply "read" it, however after re-reading it for class today I began to pick up on some things that I had missed on the first go of it. What I realized was that throughout the entire story, Juan Dahlmann seems to make very little, if any conscious decisions. In fact, I believe that the only point in the story that he make a concise and purposeful choice, was when he decided to take the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator, at the beginning of the story. Now, you might be saying, "wait, Dahlmann made other choices, he decided to go to ranch that he has been longing for." This too, is what I initially thought, however, when I was reading I realized that he went right from being in the sanatorium to being on his way to the ranch, there was no transition, not even him thinking "I'm going to go the ranch now". And the only thing that made me read closely enough to discover that this wasn't his choice at all was the mention of "destiny" at the beginning of the second paragraph. After reading that line I started reading the paper trying to figure out if any of what happened to him was due to his own choosing, or if some divine plan was the cause of everything. And what I came to find out was that after choosing to take the stairs, he simply made no more decisions. For example, once the sanatorium was about to release him the doctor told him he would go to his ranch for "convalescence". It wasn't his decision at all to go there, regardless of whether he wanted to or not. Again we see his choice voided during his train ride as the railroad inspector tells Dahlmann that he cannot get off where his ticket says, instead he must get off at an earlier stop. All of this leads to him making it to the general store where the Gaucho throws him the knife, basically making the decision to fight for him.    Well, those are just my thoughts anyways. Until next time....

My response to Gabrielle's post Number 8:

Great post Gabrielle! I completely agree with your post and think you brought some great insight here. Yes, as Juan travels from the city to the countryside we see a change from the so called "civilized" society to the "barbaric" side of life. And that as he went to the countryside issues were settled with violence, such as the knife scene in the short story. And its true, many people still view farming as the "old" way of life, even though it has made huge leaps and bounds in terms of modernization. So that is a good question, maybe its because we associate farmers as overall wearers that talk like they never went to school, which we know is not the case. But that's a solid question, that I simply do not know the answer to.