The Circular Ruins

Borges enjoyed using word play; as an Ultraist, he used words sparingly in his works while delivering a high impact of meaning. This can be seen in the story’s title, which not only describes the physical location of the story—a temple in the shape of a circle—but also refers to “The Circular Ruins” as a metaphor for creation.

Circles appear throughout the story, forming a motif that Borges uses to tie different elements together. He first describes the temple as a “circular enclosure, crowned by the stone figure of a horse or tiger” (214). Then, when the protagonist starts to dream, he is surrounded by “a circular amphitheater, which [is] somehow the ruined temple” (216), highlighting how, in dreams, objects can be two things at once. Later, the protagonist prays to the temple statue twice a day, “imagining perhaps that his unreal son perform[s] identical rituals in other circular ruins, downstream” (224).

Some of the text’s circular symbols are less obvious. The dreamer waits for a full moon when he is resting in preparation for his second attempt at dreaming a man into being, and he prays to “planetary gods.” The separate paths embarked upon by the dreamer and his son create a circle, with one dreamed being leaving for the other island each time the cycle of creation is perpetuated. The ruins themselves undergo a cycle when the fire consumes them at the end of the story, repeating what has happened many times before. Thus, readers are sent in concentric circular patterns illustrating the cycles of life.