In and out of reality

Dušan Dušek

Sonia I. Kanikova

pp. 215-230

in: Robert B. Pynsent (ed), Modern Slovak prose, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1990

Abstract

In "Death and the Compass' Borges tells of a detective who rejects the single hypothesis about the motive for the murder of a certain Talmud scholar. He rejects it on the one hand because the chance factor is too great and on the other because he considers that reality does not have to be interesting, but hypotheses have to be. The detective declares, "Before us we have a dead rabbi and I would favour an entirely rabbinical explanation".¹ He takes a highly complex path to the murderer and his motive; this path leads him into a trap which the murderer had by pure chance set for him.