The Form of the Sword and The Garden of Forking Paths

I really liked “The Form of the Sword” because even though it was short, the language that the author used was very compelling and the plot twist and the end was very unexpected. I think that it was a really clever choice for the author to make Moon tell the story in the perspective of the soldier that he got arrested, because it really added to the mystery in the story and we could see the personal connection between Moon and the soldier—by telling the story in the soldier’s point of view, we can see how much the event had emotionally impacted Moon to the point at the end where “a sob shook his body” (122) and he tells the reader to despise him. While the story originally starts in third person where Moon is referred to as “his” and the readers view Moon as a stranger, the transition to Moon telling the story in the perspective of the soldier and then to admitting that it was him and revealing his true feelings is really impactful because though it seems at first as if the readers are emotionally disconnected from “the Englishman of La Colorada” (117), the readers eventually form a really deep emotional connection to the character as he asks the readers in the end to despise him. I also appreciated the philosophical things that the author brings up, such as when he mentions “what one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men” (120).

Though I didn’t like “The Garden of Forking Paths” as much because I found it kind of confusing, I still appreciated the compelling language and philosophical ideas that the author brings up. This story definitely had more of an element of mystery to it where the readers are not sure what exactly the main character’s motives are and why exactly he’s going to this garden. His lines in the beginning, such as when he says “it seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death” (90) and when he says “I possessed the Secret—the name of the exact site of the new British artillery park on the Ancre” (90), the readers wonder what it is that is threatening him and what purpose this Secret serves in the story. We don’t find out until later how important this secret is, but after reading it through, I find the line “If only my mouth, before it should be silenced by a bullet, could shout this name in such a way that it could be heard in Germany” (90) particularly profound because it reflects what the ending of the story is about and it gives us some philosophical insight into how the “human voice, was weak” (90) such that he needed to murder in order to get the point across. I was a bit confused about the whole labyrinth and book thing, though I did somewhat understand that it had to do with a book with infinite possibilities and paths that serves as a labyrinth itself? I wasn’t really sure what this whole labyrinth and garden of forking paths had to do with the main plot, though it does seem to be some kind of metaphor for the infinite possibilities and decisions that the character could make—however, eventually, he chooses to shoot Albert. The mystery in this story for me was really how the labyrinth and garden of forking paths tied in to the story and how the readers are not sure what the main character’s motives are. The end was pretty shocking, and I appreciate that the author goes back to relate the ending to the metaphor of the endless possibilities in the labyrinth by stating that the main character “had no other course open to me than to kill someone of that name” (101)—one of the numerous possibilities that the main character did have in the story.