While reading Jorge Luis Borges’s stories the theme which impressed me mostly is that Judas could be not a traitor. In reality he was a humble hero. The fiction of two Borges’s stories, which arises from two stories “ The theme of the Traitor and the Hero” and “ Three Versions of Judas”. I will try to speak about Borges’s Judas through some aspects which Arnold Weinstein announced in the lectures about Borges’s Ficctiones. They are the following: identity, community with in, idealism and humility. (Week 9: Ficciones, Part 1)The first thing is identity.
Who was Judas Iscariot? He was one of the apostles. The word “ apostle” has different meanings in various languages. They are “ messenger, envoy” and “ missionary”.(http://en. m.
wikipedia. org/wiki/Apostle_(Christian). Concerning Borges’s Judas it can mean that he has a mission to represent God and His Son – “ Judas is somehow a reflection of Jesus”. (Borges, 86)The second thing is community with in.
I suppose we can regard apostles and Jesus Christ as a whole unit. Let’s call it a family, the primary unit of all of us. The internal and external family of Judas with the Son of God as a central figure. Every family shares a mutual destiny, members of a family influence each other. So every event, even a betrayal, was a part of family relations and decisions. And the New Testament proves it in the triple statement of Saint Peter, that he is not Jesus Christ’s disciple, when the latter was arrested.
(John, 18) So there was not only Judas in the betrayal. The third thing is idealism. What kind of reality does the author want us to ponder on? How can his ideas influence our faith? How may one try to “ explain the enigma that is Judas”? (Borges, 86) Here comes another story of Borges “ The theme of the Traitor and the Hero”. One of morals of the story is that the reality is ambivalent. Åvery ideal legend may have a mysterious story underneath, “ a strange plan”.
(Borges, 76) Fiction, But for some reasons it’s…
