The Book of Sand

“The Book of Sand” opens with the Epigraph “...thy rope of sands...” from George Herbert’s poem “The Collar,” which discusses the restrictions placed on a person by their beliefs. The speaker in Herbert’s poem ultimately appreciates the guidance offered by God, but the Epigraph contrasts this comfort with the distress and fear the Book of Sand provokes by the end of the story. The Epigraph and the opening paragraph of “The Book of Sand” highlight the subjectivity of personal experience. While Herbert questions his own perceptions, digging into the “ropes of sand” that bind him, Borges’s narrator takes a broader view of the concept of subjectivity, noting that even within a finite space, an infinite number of points exist.

The narrator of “The Book of Sand” admits from the beginning that he is not entirely sure how to open his story, noting that the geometric commentary is not quite correct. This kind of self-referential discourse is common in modernist and postmodernist works, and Borges further plays with metatextual ideas by having the narrator comment on the cliché of claiming that a story is true.