Thoughts on The Garden of Forking Paths

The Garden of Forking Paths seemed to me to be a very bizarre story. I kind of didn't really get what exactly was going on until we did the class exercise in which we came up with our own secret agent code name and killed someone who had the same name as the location that we wanted our army to blow up. This finally made things click for me. In The Garden of Forking Paths towards the end we see Borges illustrate all of the possible paths that the protaganist could have taken other than killing Allen. We see the correllation of the story to the thought process in creating the complex branching system we know today as the Internet. Both in The Garden of Forking Paths and on the Internet today there are routes, paths that fork away from eachother sometimes reconviening at later times or merging with other paths. Everything is all laid out. Everything is there within this realm, however, one simple choice in one's actions determines which paths will be made available to them in the future. Although a bit strange, I think The Garden of Forking Paths is a good way to illustrate the concept behind the World Wide Web today. The story engages the reader in a fictional tale that emphasizes key structural elements which opened minds up to the possibilities of Internet technology.