Kafka, Borges, and the creation of consciousness, Part II: Borges--a life of letters encompassing everything and nothing.

The ways in which Kafka and Borges struggled with the creation of consciousness in their lives and in their literary works are explored in this two-part essay. In Part II, a biographical sketch of Jorge Luis Borges is juxtaposed with a close reading of one of his fictions, "The Library of Babel" (1941a). In this story, the universe is an infinite Library, a psychological/literary space comprised of books that contain everything that has ever been or ever will be written. By the end of the story, Borges becomes a character in his own fiction. This development was paralleled in Borges's "real life" as he invented a persona named "Borges," a literary creation that allowed Borges to become a character in a story that was his life. The essay concludes with a comparison of the ways in which Borges and Kafka each used writing as a way of creating his own distinctive form of consciousness, and, in so doing, contributed to the creation of twentieth-century consciousness.