Furthermore, the premise of “multiform” characters is also seen in the complicated national allegiances of every character. Yu Tsun is a Chinese teacher of English working secretly for Germany’s victory; Captain Richard Madden, Tsun’s captor, is “an Irishman at the service of England,” Ireland’s irrevocable enemy (19); Stephen Albert is an English Sinologist whose interest in Ts’ui Pen exceeds that of Pen’s own countrymen, who had deemed his work “despicable” (27). In this way, it becomes notable that Borges was interested in writing not only a riddle of time, but also of space. As Albert and Tsun are able to transcend time to echo long-dead persons, so, too, does each character surpass his ethnic and geographic identity.
The reason Borges presents his story as a riddle is so the reader is tempted to solve it. Instead of looking for a “prohibited word,” the reader should rather “omit” what was stated as the theme, as is done in Pen’s novel. Borges hints that this is so when Tsun writes that “everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now... countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that is really happening is happening to me” (20). In another section, Tsun advises that “the author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past” (22). As time is the object of this riddle, the reader can therefore remove the element of time in order to discover the riddle’s answer or, in this case, reveal the story’s multiple narrative layers.
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