Summary
Borges begins by equating the Library of Babel, simply referred to throughout the story as the Library, to the universe. The Library is made of “an indefinite, perhaps infinite number” (112) of rooms shaped like hexagons. The rooms in the Library are identically designed and very sparsely decorated. There is a ventilation shaft in the middle of each room that allows you to see from that room into the rooms directly above and below. In each room there are five bookshelves on each of four of the hexagonal room’s six walls, meaning there are twenty bookshelves in all. One wall of the room has an opening that leads to another, identical room. On either side of the opening there are compartments; on one side there is a compartment for sleeping upright, on the other side there is a bathroom. There is also a spiral staircase so one can get to the floors above and below. The final decorations in each hexagon are a mirror and two light bulbs that always remain on.
In the second paragraph, the narrator begins to talk about himself and the other people who populate the Library. He says that he, like everyone in the Library, traveled when he was young. He traveled in pursuit of a special book, “the catalog of catalogs” (112). He writes that he is now an old man, preparing to die, and is still not far from the hexagon where he was born. When people die in the Library, someone throws them over the railing of one of the rooms’ ventilation shafts, and the corpse falls infinitely, decaying gradually. The narrator says that people have argued about why the rooms are hexagonal, saying that “hexagonal rooms are the necessary shape of absolute space, or at least of our perception of space” (113). They say that it is impossible for the rooms to have been triangular or pentagonal, though some people have claimed to have seen or imagined a circular room containing only a huge, circular book, which they believe is God. The narrator says that he believes the Library “is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable” (113).
The narrator returns to the specifics of the identical rooms and the objects found in them. On each of the twenty bookshelves in each room there are thirty-two books, each of which contain four hundred and ten pages. Each page has forty lines and each line contains “approximately eighty black letters” (113). The books each have letters on the front cover, but these letters have nothing to do with what is contained in the book.
The narrator now lays out two “axioms” (113). The first is that the Library has existed forever. This means that the world will also exist for a future eternity. The eternalness and perfection of the Library “can only be the handiwork of a god” (113). The second axiom is that there are twenty-five orthographic symbols used: twenty-two letters, space, comma, and period. The discovery that there are only twenty-five symbols used to make up all of the books in the Library allowed mankind to understand the random nature of what is contained in the Library’s books. The narrator notes that his own father once found a book that was made up of the letters m, c, and v repeated for the entirety of the book. Another book, which the narrator says is “much consulted” (113), is a seemingly-random assortment of letters until the phrase “O Time thy pyramids” (113) on the second to last page.
The narrator says that the books in the Library are mostly made up of a “senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency” (114), and it has long been debated whether it is worthwhile to try to draw meaning from them. Some believe that these seemingly random assortments of letters are actually in ancient or unknown languages. However, the narrator says that the book made entirely of repeating M’s, C’s, and V’s could not possibly have meaning in any language.
The narrator says that around five hundred years before, a chief of one hexagon found a book that had random letters throughout the book but two pages that were exactly the same. It is mentioned here in an editor’s note that there used to be one man for every three hexagons in the Library, but suicide and lung disease have greatly reduced the numbers. One traveling decipherer told the chief that the page was in Portuguese, while others said the language was Yiddish, and by the end of the century that consensus was that it was written in “a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with inflections from classical Arabic” (114). It was this book that allowed librarians to discover the second axiom mentioned above: that all books are made of random combinations of twenty-five symbols.
This same librarian philosopher also posited that there are no two identical books in the Library, meaning the Library must be “perfect, complete, and whole” (115), which is to say that it must contain every combination of the twenty-five symbols possible. This, in turn, leads people to postulate that the Library must contain every truth and every falsehood in every language; in the Library there must be true histories of the future and the ancient past, but also false and jumbled accounts of everything. This realization caused “unbounded joy” (115) as librarians all over the Library celebrated the eloquence of the world and went in search of a series of books called The Vindications, which were “prophecies that would vindicate for all time the actions of every person in the universe and that held wondrous arcana for men’s futures” (115). Soon, the joy turned to greed, violence, insanity, and depression. Many books and people were thrown down ventilation shafts. However, the narrator says that he knows The Vindications do exist, since he has seen two of them; the problem is that the chance of one finding their own Vindication is close to zero.
Analysis
A great place to start analyzing a short story is its title. The title of this short story, "The Library of Babel," is an allusion to a story from the Old Testament. The story of the tower of Babel, which appears in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament, describes how all the people of the world used to speak the same language. At a certain point, a plan was devised to build a tower tall enough to reach heaven. When God saw this, He scattered the people all over the world and made them speak different languages so they couldn't communicate. While neither Borges nor the narrator of "The Library of Babel" believe in a God with the power to interfere in human affairs, important themes of language and religion are foreshadowed in this title. Like in the story of the tower of Babel, in "The Library of Babel" people knowing different languages causes problems with communication, and these problems multiply over generations.
An epigraph is a short quote, usually placed at the beginning of a book or chapter, that often foreshadows content or themes. "The Library of Babel" begins with the epigraph "By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters," (112) from The Anatomy of Melancholy, written by Robert Burton in 1621. The Anatomy of Melancholy was constructed as a medical textbook chiefly concerning melancholia (which we now call depression), but includes a good deal of philosophical writing not confined to the medical realm. The use of this epigraph serves multiple roles. First, the idea of "the variation of the 23 letters" foreshadows perhaps the most important aspect of the Library: all books being composed of random variations of the same fundamental pieces. Second, the name of the book—The Anatomy of Melancholy—in conjunction with the quote foreshadows the fact that the variation of letters is what drives many librarians to depression and even suicide. Finally, the fact that the quote references 23 letters while the editor later tells us that the language of the Library—the language the narrator/write presumably wrote in—had only 22, causes the reader to question whether one should take the story as mere fiction or read it allegorically.
Borges is known for writing fiction that prioritizes plot over character, even making fiction more plot-driven when translating others' works into Spanish. In "The Library of Babel," the narrator describes the physical appearance of the Library down to the exact placement of the light bulbs before giving any information about his life or feelings. Over the course of the story, the reader comes to understand that the author is an old man, who had traveled around in search of "the catalog of catalogs" (112) when he was younger, and has a father. The text is told through the voice of the narrator, but aside from these facts, the story focuses exclusively on philosophical questions regarding the nature of the Library and the reactions of various sects of librarians to philosophical breakthroughs about the Library. This lack of focus on the narrator's life leaves the reader with many questions about the society within the Library, perhaps foremost how librarians are born and raised. However, the fact that Borges chooses not to focus on the society within the Library underscores that this story is meant to be read as a thought experiment rather than realistic fiction.
The first footnote of four included in the story comes at the bottom of the second page. On the surface, the footnote gives context to the narrator's second axiom of the Library: "There are twenty-five orthographic symbols" (113), explaining that these symbols are 22 lower case letters, as well as the comma, the period, and the space. The footnote ends, "Those...are the twenty-five sufficient symbols that our unknown author is referring so. [Ed. note.]" (113). While some readers might skim this footnote and move on, it is important to remember that this footnote was not written by an actual editor of Borges' (after all, Borges's editor would have no reason to call him "our unknown author" (113)). In fact, both the story's narrator and editor are fictional characters created by Borges, causing the reader to grapple with how a story supposedly written in a completely different universe than ours could come to be communicated to us. How did it get from this universe to ours, if both "author" and "editor" are in the alternate universe (the Library)? The fact that the author is unknown to the editor means that it was likely not given or communicated directly between the two, and someone has clearly translated the story, since the languages the narrator says all books in the Library are written in have twenty-two letters (a different number from the language in which Borges originally wrote the story, Spanish). The idea that the story has been translated in a way that may alter or obfuscate the meaning will reemerge later when the narrator directly questions whether the reader understands him.
The narrator exposes the reader to the great debate in the Library—whether any of the books have meaning—by using a few key books as examples. While each of these examples could be analyzed with regard to their particular place in the narrator's argument, the way he describes the second book is of particular importance. The narrator writes, "Another (much consulted in this zone) is a mere labyrinth of letters whose penultimate page contains the phrase O Time thy pyramids" (113-4). Borges's use of the word labyrinth links this story to many others of Borges's that feature the symbol of a labyrinth. This symbol was so frequent in Borges's stories that one book of his short stories compiled by editors Donald Yates and James E. Irby is called Labyrinths. In this story, both the books and the Library itself are labyrinths, giving the setting of the story a particularly confusing and claustrophobic feel. Furthermore, the fact that this particular book, which the narrator compares to a labyrinth, has a phrase that seems to make sense, "O Time thy pyramids," causes the reader to doubt whether this phrase holds meaning or is actually a metaphorical dead end.
