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The Library of Babel, while described in orderly, geometric terms, is in reality a three-dimensional endless labyrinth. Though it is reminiscent of any large Library the reader may have used, it defies logical sense through its sheer size. That the floor stretches out endlessly is its own impossibility, but when paired with the concept that there are innumerable floors above and below any given floor, the mind reels, rendering the scope meaningless by its enormity. While someone can presumably reach, via corridors and stairs, any gallery they wish to visit, it is impossible to visit every gallery, simply because the human body cannot live long enough to travel the immensity of the Library. 

The Library, of course, is an impossible space, with no account of how people are born, educated, and thrive into adulthood. Even with sleeping closets and bathrooms adjacent to every gallery, the Library is not a place that the mind can truly picture. Borges plays with the limits of the imagination, knowing that the concept of the infinite is practically ungraspable. The Library must, necessarily, recede fuzzily into the distance as the reader tries to picture the setting, allowing the story to sit in a strange in-between place in the imagination of the reader. The reader can easily picture the gallery in which the narrator tells the story, perhaps even a few more that surround it. But as the mind attempts to pull back to encompass the extent of the story’s setting, it does not hold together, in the same way that large numbers quickly become unreal.

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