The Garden of Forking Paths Quotes: The Non-Linear Nature of Time and Reality

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“I told myself that the duel had already started and that I had won the first encounter by besting my adversary in his first attack—even if it was only for forty minutes—by an accident of fate. I argued that so small a victory prefigured a total victory.”

This passage occurs as Yu Tsun, on board the train to Ashgrove, sees Madden running futilely down the platform as the train departs. Yu Tsun’s sense that the act of beating Madden to the train means his whole unlikely plan will succeed is an example of the non-linear nature of time and reality explained in Ts-ui Pên’s image of forking paths. The decisions that led Yu Tsun to arrive at the train station ahead of Madden form the path that leads to a version of the universe where his plan succeeds. In this sense, winning the race to the station does ultimately lead to triumph, since he would not have succeeded at all had he not gotten to the train first. The path of the story that leads to his successfully transmitting the name “Albert” to the Chief must begin with his ability to escape Madden long enough to reach Stephen Albert’s house. The set of events set in motion by Yu Tsun’s decision to take a cab to the station forms a forking path of reality, an example of the theme of non-linear time and reality in the story.

He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility.

Stephen Albert speaks these words to Yu Tsun near the end of the story as he explains the nature of Ts-ui Pên’s novel. Albert reveals that the novel’s title, The Garden of Forking Paths, refers to Ts-ui Pên’s idea of time and reality splitting off into infinite networks of variation. This is an example of Borges’s theme in the story of the non-linear nature of time and reality. While the story only follows Yu Tsun through one set of decisions and outcomes, Albert refers here and at other times to the idea that other timelines for this story also exist, with different circumstances and potential outcomes. With these words, Borges also suggests that the version of the story he has written is only one possible version. The passage undermines the idea that the story itself represents a recording of singular reality. Instead, Albert’s speech implies that the story Borges has written is only one of an infinite number of paths the same characters might have taken, part of his theme of non-linear time and reality.