The Garden of Forking Paths

The text begins by embodying one of the story’s central themes: We live among many potential alternate historical timelines in which the facts we assume to be the most foundational to our reality may shift slightly, profoundly changing our current circumstances. The story presents discrepancies: Liddell Hart’s A History of the World War is a real-life text and a revision of an earlier work (The Real War) by the same author—but Tsun appears nowhere in actual version of Liddell Hart’s history as the short story suggests (in this edition of the short story, the deposition is said to appear on page 212 of Liddell Hart’s work, but in others the account begins on page 22 or 252). Additionally, the Serre-Montauban incident is historical, not fictional, and began on July 1, 1916—but in Liddell Hart’s history as Borges presents it, it began on July 29. While such inconsistent details may seem like minor errors, Borges reminds us in these variations that there are layers of voices in the story: an editor, one whose judgments and errors can alter the reader’s understanding of historical events; Liddell Hart, author of the text from which the deposition is ostensibly excerpted;