Labyrinth

The Circular Ruins was a very intriguing read for me. I thought that it was beautifully and lucidly written despite the subject matter being all about dreams. The narrator goes through dream sequences attempting to "dream a man," the perfect, idealized man. Immortality is referenced and achieved in the story through the process of cloning, The narrator seeks immortality by dreaming up his own son by visualizing a beating heart. In the end though, the narrator eventually realizes that he himself is just the product of a dream, from another person. The labyrinth in this story is metaphorical and temporal. It all takes place within the world of a dreamscape.

The second story, The Library of Babel, also contains a metaphorical and temporal labyrinth. In this story, a library functions as a metaphor for the universe. The narrator talks of spending his youth, like most others, in search of a book within the library. The books in the library supposedly contain every possible combination of the characters in the alphabet. However, because of the massive wealth of information, many of the readers in the library feel despair, and actively try to destroy books. Others believe that a messiah of sorts exists as a figure who read and has access to a book that perfectly indexes the library's contents. I rather like this idea of a library as a a labyrinth. Visually, it works very well, with the endless shelves filled with endless scores of text.

The tale of Sisyphus contains the most literal representation of a labyrinth out of all the stories. His labyrinth is also the most inescapable and inevitable. He was doomed to roll a massive boulder to the top of a steep hill, however, before reaching the peak, the stone would always roll back down. Although this is a labyrinth, it's much more simpler in structure than the labyrinth in the other stories. While the other stories contained labyrinths that could be traversed, navigated, and even journeyed through, Sisyphus's labyrinth just functions as eternal punishment.