Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Foreign Languages

Reader 1

Claudia Arteaga

Reader 2

France Lemoine

Abstract

This essay examines the philosophical and narrative parallels between Jorge Luis Borges and Marcel Proust through a close reading of the opening and closing scenes of Proust's "Overture" in Swann's Way and Borges's short story "The Garden of Forking Paths." Both authors are preoccupied with how internal consciousness shapes the external world, employing fragmentation, nonlinear time, and moments of revelation to explore the relationship between subjective experience and universal meaning. While their narrators share the trait of perceiving the world through equivocal, biased judgements, their underlying philosophies diverge sharply: Proust ultimately believes in the power of individual language to preserve experience and reconstruct identity, whereas Borges situates all perception within a collective imaginary that no individual act of writing can transcend. By analyzing how each author treats time, consciousness, and revelation, this essay argues that their distinct approaches reveal fundamentally different convictions about what literature is capable of communicating.

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