Discuss one of the following quotations (from Donald Leslie Shaw) re Borges's method and goals in Ficciones.
“Time, [Borges] reminds us, is a mystery; our sense of ourselves as individuals is perhaps an illusion; if the 'really real' exists, it is questionable whether human language can express it."
"In Borges's view, man's characteristic response to his situation is to select from the flux of sense-impressions those which it is comfortable to live with, screening out, as far as possible, the rest. Thus man creates a mental habitat, a construct of reality in which to take refuge from a chaotic universe. For this last, Borges's favourite metaphor is the labyrinth.”
“Borges's stories are not about the enigmatic nature of the 'real' at all, but essentially about the act of writing” -- fiction drawing attention to itself as fiction and to the language which constructs it.
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