Blog 8- Thoughts on "The South"

Before spring break, we read "The South", by Jorge Luis Borges. I thought it was a pretty interesting short story, and again, I really enjoyed the fact that it was fiction. With fiction, there are almost always many different ways to interpret the reading and many different ideas that can be taken out of a story. One thing that I believe became pretty clear to me by the end of this short story was that Juan Dahlmaan never truly left the sanitarium.

Dahlmaan is hospitalized by a pretty careless injury, hitting his head on something while running up the stairs. He initially talks about basically experiencing hell and the pain that he experienced with this injury. The surgeon actually told him that he was on the point of death from septicemia. First of all, I looked up sepsis and discovered that even today; sepsis takes the lives of millions of people each year. This is one fact that might lead the reader to believe that Dahlmaan never made it out... Another hint that Dahlmaan's wound was fatal is that in the beginning of the second paragraph, Borges states that "destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction." This statement kind of foreshadows that this injury is going to prove to be fatal and that this is his unfortunate destiny. Also, later in the story (supposedly after he is released from the sanitarium), Juan rides a train and gets off at a general store where he recognizes the shopkeeper to be one of the male nurses from the sanitarium. This leads me to believe that he is actually just imagining this whole experience and that the shopkeeper is purely a figment of his imagination, and he is actually the male nurse. Finally, at the end of the story, Dahlmaan is able to choose his own death. He describes it being "a liberation, a joy, and a festive occasion" which to me seems quite an odd way to describe death. He also relates being stuck with the needle in the sanitarium to being killed with a knife and that "this would have been the death he would have chosen or dreamt." All of these signs lead to the main idea that Dahlmaan never really got better, and that the events he experienced after being released from the sanitarium were all just a figment of his imagination and a dream that would never truly come true.