Break of Day and Circular Ruins

In Break of Day we see Jorge Luis Borges question and doubt the concept of existence. Recalling the conjectures of “Shopenhauer and Berkeley” (line eleven), the speaker of the poem fears that life is nothing but a dream by souls. He ponders that sleep is a threat of extinction to this dream and assumes that those who stay up all night are the small percentage that are keeping life, as we know it, alive until day begins again. The break of day is the point when all is safe again; there is one more day to live.

Between The Circular Ruins and “Break of Day” I saw a lot of connections. Perhaps this is because both works were written by Borges. Equally characters in the stories seem to be lost amongst their dreams and reality.

In The Circular Ruins, the main character retreats to dream up his son; the man who will take on his place and magical talents in the world. Several times when he cannot sleep to dream he flees to the jungle to tire himself. However, when his son is finally conceived after one-thousand and one nights the main character suddenly believes something of his entire existence; “that he, too, was appearance that another man was dreaming.” I don’t think this epiphany was a question that was intended to be answered. The main character sort of stumbled upon it. It may have been the question fate had anticipated him to answer all along.