The Aleph

Borges is the narrator and protagonist of “The Aleph” and shares the name of the story’s author. Borges’s attributes are as enigmatic as the details of his relationship with the deceased Beatriz—his name is not revealed until just before he views the Aleph. Borges admits that his intent to remain unchanging in a changing universe is “melancholy vanity,” which could describe his character as a whole. Disillusioned and sentimental, he concocts the measured pleasure of his annual visits to Beatriz’s family as a bomb. His description of these visits as “melancholy and vainly erotic” (119) says much about Borges the narrator. Through his reactions to Argentino, who is in contrast fully rendered by description, readers see Borges’s vain and melancholy disposition in action.

When Argentino begins his overwrought poetic expressions, Borges does not hold back his criticism of the man who is revealed as his romantic rival. Borges is a writer too, author of a work called The Sharper’s Cards, which the narrator mentions as not having received a single vote in the contest Argentino placed second in. Borges the author wrote an unpublished collection of essays by the same name.