The Book of Sand

The narrator provides layers of foreshadowing in the story to hint to readers that the book and his interactions with it are unsettling, even before his obsession and disillusionment with it are revealed. The most obvious example of this is on the first page when the narrator comments of the salesman: “He gave off an air of melancholy, as I myself do now” (480). This reveals that even though the initial acquisition of the book is going to be exciting, it will ultimately lead to suffering.

Likewise, when the salesman tells him to look at the image of an anchor carefully, as he “will never see it again,” the “threat” that the narrator perceives in the words—but not in the salesman’s voice—foreshadows the ensuing obsession with the book (481). Specifically, the narrator ends up trying to track and map the frequency of images in the text, seeking out possible repetition. The salesman knows the path that the narrator will take, and he reveals that route before even the narrator knows how his obsession will take shape.

The narrator of Borges’s story is decidedly unreliable, not in the sense that he is lying to the reader, but in his uncertainty of himself and his own story. He questions his own opening, noting that geometry is “decidedly not the best way to begin [his] tale” (480). Further, he acknowledges the cliché of claiming that a story is true, noting that “[his], nevertheless, is true” (480). The contrast of geometry to social and literary convention points to a discussion of truth and physical reality in the first paragraph. Though the narrator is compelled to open the tale with a discussion of what is physically true, he reverts to literary convention to insist that he is a reliable narrator.

The narrator’s reliability is challenged, as well, by his nearsightedness, which he admits may affect his perception. The only two features that he notes with confidence about his visitor are that the salesman is impoverished and foreign, but Borges calls the truth of these claims into question by establishing the narrator as potentially unreliable early in the text. As a device, unreliable first-person narration opens the possibility that none of the story is true or that only some aspects of it are true. Moving into the more abstract discussions of the story, such as infinity, time, and mysticism, the narrator’s unreliability suggests that the book may not infinite or that the narrator may not be mentally stable enough to provide an accurate version of the story’s events.

Many authors and works are mentioned in the story, including John Wycliffe and the Wycliffe Bible; One Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights; and Stevenson, Hume, and Robert Burns. However, the story’s primary allusion, or evocation of another story or genre without making an explicit reference to it, is to the genres of fantasy and horror. More specifically, the finding of the book and its mystical powers harken to powerful objects found in works like The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia. This allusion to the fantasy genre helps the reader understand the mystical pull of the Book of Sand, since, initially, the book is like a magic wand or J. R. R. Tolkien’s one ring, promising an endless potential for power.

At the same time, the horror of the book evokes H. P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, or The Book of the Dead. Borges mentions that an earlier story in his collection is a direct reference to Lovecraft, but its influence on “The Book of Sand” is also evident. The Necronomicon is a more literally monstrous book than Borges’s imagined one, as it is made from human skin and contains dark magic. More importantly, the Necronomicon, like the Book of Sand, hails from the Middle East, reinforcing the themes of Orientalism and postcolonial thought. The character Abdul Alhazred, the “Mad Arab,” is the author of Lovecraft’s fictional book. Like the Book of Sand, this text’s “foreign,” “Eastern” origin forms the basis of its mystery and spirituality, as well as of its dangers.