La sombra de los libros sobre la ciudad. Espacialización del relato y confiabilidad del narrador en Borges

Abstract

The spacialisation of the poetic subject was one of the literary techniques used by Borges in the twenties and recycled in the forties in his narrative: the poetic subject turns into a first person narrator that projects itself over the city of Buenos Aires. The still images of his poetry are replaced in the short stories by an exploration movement of the urban space that founds a tradition in the history of representation of the city in argentine culture. The narrators of the stories written during the forties show a tendency to identify themselves to the author and, at the same time, are presented as unreliable; the texts exemplify a series of violent interactions between narrator and reader that usually characterize detective novel, a genre that particularly interests Borges at the time.