Blog #8: Dreams Vs. Reality

This week, I went back and re-read “The South” by Jorge Luis Borges in order to respond to our discussion question. As I was reading it, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Did Dahlmann ever leave the sanitarium and die in a knife fight in the south or was it all just a dream?” The more I looked into it, the more convinced I am that he never really left the hospital. The most convincing quote is when Dalmann was on the train looking out the window and thinks to himself, “Tomorrow I'll wake up at the ranch, he thought, and it was as if he was two men at a time: the man who traveled through the autumn day and across the geography of the fatherland, and the other one, locked up in a sanitarium and subject to methodical servitude.” He talks about being two different men: one who is traveling back to the ranch (Dream) and one who is still stuck in the sanitarium (Reality) I think he is dreaming about taking a train across the countryside and reading his book but in reality he is imprisoned in the hospital dying. In the documentary on Borges, I remember the narrator saying something about the themes of Borges’s writings including the idea of dreams vs. reality. This story may be one of them. There are other parts of the story that also lead me to believe that Dahlmann was dreaming. He even says,“The solitude was perfect, perhaps hostile, and it might have occurred to Dahlmann that he was traveling into the past and not merely south.” In the beginning of the story, we are told that Dahlmann wanted to die like his maternal grandfather so I think that by going to the South, he is traveling back in time in order to die a romantic death. Dahlmann also saw some elements of the sanitarium on his journey to the South, “Once inside, Dahlmann thought he recognized the shopkeeper. Then he realized that he had been deceived by the man's resemblance to one of the male nurses in the sanitarium.” He thought that the nurse that was caring for him was the shopkeeper in his dream.  Last, the ending seems to me like he is dreaming his death. Dahlmann was challenged to a knife fight with gauchos in the south and he went out to the countryside fearlessly to die, “They went out and if Dahlmann was without hope, he was also without fear. As he crossed the threshold, he felt that to die in a knife fight, under the open sky, and going forward to the attack, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a festive occasion, on the first night in the sanitarium, when they stuck him with the needle. He felt that if he had been able to choose, then, or to dream his death, this would have been the death he would have chosen or dreamt.” He even says he would pick this death over dying in the sanitarium. In the beginning of the story, we are told that Dahlmann wanted to take after his maternal grandfather, “in the discord inherent between his two lines of descent, Juan Dahlmann (perhaps driven to it by his Germanic blood) chose the line represented by his romantic ancestor, his ancestor of theromantic death”. The knife fight is the romantic death that he had wanted to die just like his maternal grandfather’s death. I think Dahlmann used his imagination to change his destiny. What do you think?