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    A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The House of Asterion"
    A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The House of Asterion"
    A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The House of Asterion"
    Ebook45 pages42 minutes

    A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The House of Asterion"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The House of Asterion," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535837422
    A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The House of Asterion"

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      A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The House of Asterion" - Gale

      11

      The House of Asterion

      Jorge Luis Borges

      1947

      Introduction

      The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was veritably raised in his father's library and proceeded to spend his life making profound contributions to libraries around the world as the preeminent Latin American author of his era and a patriarch of postmodernism. The stories of his two most famous collections, Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949), present the characteristic Borgesian blend of metaphysical quandaries, intricate plotlines, mortal circumstances, and startled revelations on the part of both characters and reader. For La casa de Asterión (The House of Asterion), Borges drew on Greek mythology and the ancient version of one of his favorite symbols, the labyrinth, to fashion a cryptic story to fill a few blank pages for the literary magazine Los Anales de Buenos Aires as it was going to press in the spring of 1947. The story was subsequently published in El Aleph.

      Advancing through the story, the reader gleans from the first-person account that the narrator is a seclusive and increasingly peculiar aristocrat, only to find at the end that the Minotaur—with the body of a man and the head of a bull—has told of his life in the labyrinth. The Minotaur was slain by Theseus, whose casual aside on the beast's fairly indifferent death explicitly reveals the creature's identity to the reader to close the story. Borges was inspired to write this story in part by an 1896 painting by G. K. Watts, The Minotaur, which depicts the muscular torso and taurine (bull-like) head of a pensive and subtly pathetic Minotaur looking out to sea, with a bird crushed under his left hand. The House of Asterion has appeared in Borges's English-language volumes Labyrinths (1962) and Collected Fictions (1998).

      Author Biography

      Borges was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on August 24, 1899, into an upper-class family of Spanish, Portuguese, and English heritage. Both of his grandfathers were Argentine military officers of high rank, while his father was a lawyer and a modestly accomplished man of letters, having published a novel as well as the premier Spanish translation of the Persian poetry of Omar Khayyám. As a boy who showed signs of frailness at a young age, including a congenital eye defect from his father's side, Borges led a sheltered childhood. Because of his father's distrust of the nation's educational system, he did not attend school until he was nine years old. In the meantime, he was enthralled by his father's library'a place he would reminiscence fondly about as an adult—and read voraciously, showing early interest in the English-language work of authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain. He would later remark, once he

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