The background is World War I Europe, and the genre is a prisoner's written confession in prison. The plot took place in Britain 19 16. It tells the story of Dr. Yu Zhun, as a spy of the German army, facing the pursuit of British agent Madden. Because Yu Zhun had mastered a top secret military intelligence (there was a British artillery position that threatened the German army in the French town of Albert), but his normal contact with the German boss was interrupted, he was inspired to flee for his life and killed a man with the same name as Albert City, hoping that his German boss could decipher the secret of the murder through newspapers in order to achieve the purpose of transmitting information. The target that Yu Zhun randomly found is a sinologist who has worked in China for many years-Stephen Albert. Stephen Albert devoted himself to studying an unfinished novel by his great-grandfather Peng Dang, entitled A Garden with Branched Paths. This novel is a maze that Tang Peng wants to build, and the answer is "time". After I killed Albert, I was arrested and imprisoned. His German boss really guessed his plan from the murder case and blew Albert City into ruins.
The novel is cleverly conceived and has the beauty of a maze. The novel begins with an extremely realistic and accurate detail description, which is as real as a narrative history. The narrative of this third-person stealth narrator is "super narrative layer". The purpose of "super narrative layer" narrative is to lead to "main narrative layer", which carefully arranges a scam to create a seemingly real historical background for the main narrative layer. Then, in an unconscious or sudden way, it turns into illusion or disappears in the speculation of philosophy, theology and cosmology. The main part of this novel is Yu Zhun's confession in prison. The "main narrative layer" is a spy story told by the first person. In this part, the author reaches the ultimate level with suspense and coincidence. A * * * relayed three stories, namely, the story of a spy in Zhun, the story of sinologist Stephen Albert and the story of Tang Peng, the governor of ancient Yunnan. We call Tang Peng's story "sub-narrative level". It was narrated by sinologist Stephen Abbott in the first person, which gave the novel a name. This story about the maze of time is the core of the novel. Three stories overlap, and many coincidences overlap. There is narrative in narrative, just like the road in a maze. There are forks in the fork, the plot crosses, interlocking and endless. Similar to the frame structure of Arabian Nights and Water Margin. And the ending of the story makes the reader immersed in a bigger fog. It seems that a new "maze" remains in the reader's mind.
In the process of telling this story, Borges talked about solving this mystery, but at the same time he kept covering it up. "Readers are constantly losing their way in this layer of fog." It was not until the end of the novel that I realized the author's ingenuity.
Borges expressed his philosophical thinking about time in his novels. The "Fork Garden" is not only a virtual garden described in Tang Peng's novels, but also a real garden centered on Ming Xuzhai. In fact, it is Tang Peng's endless time garden. Among them, the intersection of paths refers to the bifurcation of time rather than space, that is, "the coexistence of multiple possibilities leads to the coexistence of different futures and endings". Time is multidimensional, accidental, intersecting, nonlinear and ultimately infinite. Every choice of the hero has an ending that is irreversible. Once chosen, there is no turning back, and there is no difference between the best and the worst. Peng Dang's garden, Albert's garden and Yu Zhun's garden stand opposite each other and reflect each other in different time and space, forming a "garden maze". Yu Zhun is a fugitive, a murderer, a military spy who is afraid of death and makes it in cold blood, a tragic figure caught in the maze of impermanence of life, and a comedian who is intoxicated with creating the maze. Borges perfectly combines his thinking about time and fictional narrative mode in this novel. It is well-deserved to call it "magic realism".
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