The Circular Ruins

An epigraph is a quotation that precedes a work and suggests the work’s theme or frame of reference. “And if he left off dreaming about you…?” is the epigraph for “The Circular Ruins” and is from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871). It alludes to a conversation between Alice and Tweedle-dee and Tweedledum as they watch the Red King sleeping:

‘He’s dreaming now,’ said Tweedledee: ‘and what do you think he’s dreaming about?’

Alice said, ‘Nobody can guess that.’

‘Why, about you!’ Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. ‘And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?’

‘Where I am now, of course,’ said Alice.

‘Not you!’ Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. ‘You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!’ (Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. Macmillan and Co., 1882, p. 81).

This is a fitting epigraph, as it links with Borges’s themes of circularity and the similarity between the dreaming and waking worlds. Tweedledee’s assertion that Alice would cease to exist if the Red King stopped dreaming foreshadows the protagonist’s final epiphany in “The Circular Ruins.”