Abstract:

The Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges constructs a narrative structure in the story entitled “The South” (“El Sur”) through the opposition between ‘reality’ and ‘dream’ and substantiates the narrative by means of concepts such as time, destiny and death, characteristic motifs of his stories, thus creates a multilayered text. A passageway opens between the objective time and space of the level of reality and the subjective time and space of the fictional level when the protagonist, initially positioned at the level of reality in the beginning of the narrative passes on to the fictional level. Through the passage defined by the narrator as ‘threshold passages’ in the story, the spaces of reality and fiction appear to blend into each other and consequently, the objective time and the subjective time coincide occasionally and fall apart at other times. The protagonist, moving towards death in the level of reality, gains freedom to determine his own destiny, dreaming and devising his way of dying at his own free will in the fictional level. The narrative in “The South” proceeds over oppositions: the space in the universe of reality that leads the protagonist towards a state of passivity turns into a space that puts the subject in an active position in the fictional universe; whilst North symbolizes a life of culture, South is the symbol for traditions; the subject lives in the present, in the North and in the past, in the South. Death, that appears to be the one and only term that does not come forth with its opposite in the opposition of North and South, implies an end which turns out to be the same in the North and the South. Meaning in “The South” is revealed through the passages between the series of consecutive episodes at various levels of the narrative and in the inner functioning of the episodes producing the series. The construction of the narrative comes into existence in the juxtaposition and the connection between the narrative levels. The objective of this study is to carry out an analysis of the story entitled “The South,” studying the coordinates of character/space/time. The study, starting with the relations between the three coordinates, aims to fill the gaps as far as possible and to analyse the narrative as a whole. Thus, the significant relations organizing the narrative come to light thoroughly within a system