The Library of Babel: Main Ideas

The universe is ultimately unknowable.

As the narrator describes the orderly nature of the Library, it seems graspable. With the same number of bookshelves and books and lines repeated, the Library seems to be a wonder of efficiency. But, as the scope of Library is revealed, it becomes clear that there is no way for anyone, even some enormous group of people, to derive usable information from the Library. In this way, Borges’s Library reflects the universe in which the reader exists. As scientists have observed, it is impossible to truly understand the universe. In addition to the fact that it seems to be constantly expanding, even when people learn one thing, other questions emerge. The truths that people have discerned from observation and experimentation are tiny pieces of the universe that we have access to. In the same way, the people of the Library spend their lives searching for words or phrases that make sense. They hope that those glimpses will spur further understanding, but the Library resists easy connections, revealing no easy throughlines. According to the narrator, this frustration is either an inducement to further investigation or a reason for unrelenting despair. It seems inarguable that no one in the Library will ever be able to truly understand it, and the consequences of that knowledge are determined individually.

Glimpses of understanding are what compel further investigation.

Even as the idea of understanding the Library seems impossible, there are those who continue to try. The narrator himself states that he spent many years working through books, trying to build connections that would lead to some rudimentary comprehension. Borges suggests that, against all odds, there are those who are compelled to continue the search, in the face of almost certain failure. This idea can be easily mapped onto the scientific community at large. Though it is clear that the universe, and even the relative tiny speck that is Earth, is so complex as to be fundamentally unknowable, people still seek answers. It is the little moments of comprehension that keep people going. If they can know one thing, they can know another. In this way, humanity builds its knowledge base, and that base allows others to build atop it.

Humanity is able to clearly communicate our understanding to one another, which is something that the Library does not allow for. That is what makes the moments of sense the librarians have found all the more compelling. It cannot help but provide evidence that the entire truth of the Library is contained within it, somewhere. Luckily, in the world outside the story, there are threads that can be followed, and the beads of perception do point, logically, to other ideas. These throughlines keep those seeking further truths from wandering endlessly, as some do in the Library, flipping through uncounted numbers of books, to the point of madness or despair.

The Library expands upon the story of the Tower of Babel.

In the Bible, the story of the Tower of Babel is an attempt to explain why people around the world speak different languages. According to this story, God saw that by working together with a common language, humans could create objects and ideas to attempt to rival those of God. In order to prevent that, God scrambled their languages and set people all over the world, unable to communicate. The Library takes this idea and expands on it. Instead of just dividing people into groups by their language, the Library is a universe where people have not only been divided spatially, but also the words themselves have been scrambled, reconfigured, and broken into random letters. It would seem that the desire of the god that the narrator believes to have created the Library is to fracture all language and thus all people, leaving them to wander, forever hoping to come upon some modicum of sense that would allow for true communication.

There is a strange cruelty in the biblical story. It allows some people to stay connected, but they are far from others with whom they could achieve anything. Thus, by dividing people, humanity cannot fulfill its true potential, as symbolized by the Tower of Babel. This cruelty is mirrored in the Library, which is seemingly built to separate people in their various quests for understanding. By limiting connection, both in lack of proximity and in the incomprehensibility of the texts, the creator of the Library guarantees the fruitlessness of those quests.

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