"The Immortal" is the title of a short story by noted Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. He published it in the collection El Aleph, 1949. The story tells about a character who mistakenly achieves immortality and then, weary of a long life, struggles to lose it and writes an account of his experiences.
The story consists of a quote, an introduction, five chapters, and a post script.
Borges begins by quoting Francis Bacon's Essays, LVIII. "Salo...
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"The Immortal" is the title of a short story by noted Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. He published it in the collection El Aleph, 1949. The story tells about a character who mistakenly achieves immortality and then, weary of a long life, struggles to lose it and writes an account of his experiences.
The story consists of a quote, an introduction, five chapters, and a post script.
Borges begins by quoting Francis Bacon's Essays, LVIII. "Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion."
The introduction takes place in London in the first part of June 1929. Herein the following five chapters are purported to have been found in the last of six volumes in small quarto (1715-20) of Alexander Pope's Iliad.
The story is an autobiographical tale told by a Roman soldier, Marcus Flaminius Rufus, during the reign of the emperor Diocletian. During...
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