Synopsis and Observations
Jorge Luis Borges’ Everything and Nothing is a prose-poem folded like origami into the silence between history and myth. At once sparse and sacred, the piece resists conventional narrative in favor of meditation. Borges does not offer a biography, but rather a void shaped like a man. The subject, William Shakespeare, is introduced not with fanfare but with absence, with an image not of life but of erasure. “There was no one in him,” Borges writes, collapsing the myths, manuscripts, and monuments of the Bard into a single line that unravels identity at its core.
The poem opens in stillness, but it is a charged stillness, humming with ontological disquiet. Shakespeare, who summoned empires from ink and breathed into being a thousand souls, is here rendered not as creator, but as conduit. Borges does not portray him as a man of ego or essence, but as a ghost without origin, a spectral presence built entirely from the voices he ventriloquized. He is Falstaff’s mirth, Lear’s howl, Juliet’s longing, and yet behind the masks, Borges finds only air. The more he spoke, the more he vanished.
What Borges achieves is not a stripping away of Shakespeare’s brilliance, but a reconfiguration of its source. Instead of seeking to explain the man behind the myth, Borges kneels beside his absence and calls it sacred. It is not a diminishing, but a deification of emptiness. The reverence here lies not in what Shakespeare was, but in what he was not: a self. Borges elevates this void not as failure but as metaphysical potential, a womb of voices, a prism through which the infinite refracts. He writes “his words, which were copious, fantastic, and agitated, there was no more than a slight chill, a dream dreamt by no one.”
In this act of interpretive negation, Borges aligns Shakespeare not with the historical individual, but with the archetype of the modern subject: diffuse, decentered, and constructed from performance. The man disappears so that the myth may speak. Identity, Borges suggests, is not something we possess but something we enact, a drama whose actor leaves no trace when the curtain falls. By beginning with this sacred absence, Borges inaugurates a philosophical spiral that will deepen as the prose unfolds, of which I would argue is not toward meaning, but into the hollow where meaning once pretended to live.
There is no traditional plot in Everything and Nothing, but there is unmistakable movement that is slow, spiraling, like a star collapsing inward. The progression is not narrative but metaphysical. Rather than tracing a sequence of events, Borges traces a sequence of ideas, each folding into the next with the quiet gravity of revelation. The prose unfurls like a riddle in reverse, beginning with the biographical outline of Shakespeare, be it his dates, his works, his fame, and then peeling away the layers until nothing remains but a question trembling in the void.
Borges speaks to how Shakespeare “was as invisible, as secret, and as real as a god. In London, in the early seventeenth century, he found himself faced with the task of creating a man who would be all men and who would still be himself.” This movement is not horizontal but vertical; it descends, or perhaps ascends, from history into paradox. The Shakespeare we begin with, whom is the writer, the man of the theatre, is gradually destabilized.
As Borges draws us further into the text, we encounter not a resolution but a recursion. The story spirals rather than progresses, and with each turn of the spiral, what changes is not Shakespeare himself, but our understanding of what it means to be a self at all. Borges performs a quiet reversal: the closer we come to the man, the more he dissolves. Like a Möbius strip, Borges’ Shakespeare folds inside-out until the surface becomes the absence. By the end of the piece, even the divine is drawn into this spiral.
The final moment, a meeting between the actor and God, does not offer closure but collapse. God, like Shakespeare, confesses uncertainty: “I do not know who I am.” With that line, the metaphysical floor drops away. Borges refuses to anchor identity in either mortal or divine origin. Instead, he leaves us suspended in a shared bewilderment, where the self is not a source but an echo passed between voices.
Shakespeare, in this vision, becomes a prism rather than a person. He is not a singular self, but a lens through which the light of countless human experiences is refracted. With each role he inhabited he splintered further from anything resembling a stable core. The characters he played do not point back to the playwright as windows to his essence. Instead, they serve as veils, tissues of emotion and form that are draped over the abyss where a self might have been. Borges does not suggest that Shakespeare lacked humanity, but rather that his humanity was so porous, so open to the voices of others, that it ceased to form a boundary.
Shakespeare “thought of himself as no one, and he therefore created so many characters, so many worlds, that no one would remember he had ever been no one.” His genius was not to express a self, but to dissolve into the selves of others. In refracting the human condition through Shakespeare’s masks, Borges quietly asserts a devastating truth, that identity may be the most elaborate illusion of all. What we call a self may only be a gallery of borrowed gestures, a chorus of voices echoing in a space that no longer contains a speaker.
Formally, Borges writes with scalpel precision, slicing not only into language but into the illusion of essence. There is no ornament for ornament’s sake. His sentences arrive stripped bare, lean and lyrical, like philosophical aphorisms smuggled into prose, the syntax spare and direct, yet every word carrying immense philosophical weight. This restraint is not emptiness but control. Borges pares his language down to the bone, until each phrase feels as though it is teetering on the edge of silence, always on the verge of vanishing. The prose does not shout, but rather it hums beneath the skin. I find that the writing is vivid, yet not to the point of indulgence, poetic and metaphysical without excess.
Borges writes of “Teetering on the edge of silence”, a line ending in absence, gesturing towards the reality of vanishing rather than the revelation we as humans often crave. “Philosophical aphorisms smuggled into prose”, a line of which reads like a distilled existential insight disguised as narrative, the inner turmoil of a man poured onto the page. Each sentence folds inward, recursive and self-negating. Borges’ language performs the very crisis of identity he describes: what appears solid at first glance evaporates upon closer inspection. In this way, his form mimics the paradox it describes. The structure of the prose is not just a vessel for Shakespeare’s dissolution, but the enactment of it. Each clause trails into negation; each paragraph coils back to question its own foundation. What Borges reveals is not merely that Shakespeare lacked a self, but that language itself may be complicit in that absence.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the title itself: Everything and Nothing. These two poles, infinity and nullity, are suspended in uneasy proximity. The conjunction “and” acts not as a bridge but as a fracture, not a synthesis but stalemate. The title becomes a riddle, a trembling contradiction, in that how can one possess everything and yet be nothing. Or more disturbingly, how can everything be nothing in disguise. This tension in the title resonates with metaphysical despair, but also with poetic reverence.
Borges seems to suggest that within that contradiction lies the secret shape of existence itself. Borges’ form does not only illustrate the emptiness within Shakespeare, but rather serves to implicate us as well. If language can be this precise and yet ultimately fail to fix a self in place, then perhaps the problem is not with the man, but with the medium. Borges, in this light, is not just diagnosing Shakespeare’s identity crisis, but he is diagnosing our own. The text becomes a mirror, and we, like Shakespeare, may find that our reflection folds into nothing.
One of the most striking motifs in Borges’ Everything and Nothing is that of performance as being. Shakespeare, in this vision, is not portrayed as an autonomous creator, but as an empty vessel, a porous medium through which the voices of others pass. Borges writes, “He was not able to be anyone; he was each one of us, like the Cheshire cat that disappears until nothing is left but the smile.” This haunting image reframes identity not as essence, but as residue, what remains after the self has vanished.
The smile persists, but the face is gone. This vision recasts authorship itself: no longer a generative force from within, but a recursive echo of what has already been spoken. Shakespeare, the man who gave voice to Hamlet’s dread, Lear’s madness, and Othello’s jealousy, is revealed to have had “no one in him.” The irony is devastating, in that this man, saturated with voices, had none of his own. The more he became others, the more he ceased to be. Borges positions performance not as concealment, but as the only available mode of existence. By Borges mind, to be is to enact, and to endure is to dissolve.
This existential irony ripples across every layer of the prose. As previously noted, the text offers no climax in its structure, no traditional resolution. It meanders like memory, recursive and unresolved. Thematically, it refuses to grant Shakespeare the coherence of a self, denying readers the comfort of a singular identity behind the many masks. And philosophically, it merges art with annihilation. Shakespeare’s greatness lies not in his self-expression, but in his self-erasure. In this way, Borges elevates disappearance into a form of transcendence.
Borges’ treatment of Shakespeare is not as a wellspring of originality, but as a structural role performed within a broader system of texts and cultural memory. Daniel Balderston echoes this reading in Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges, where he observes that Borges “deconstructs the idea of a unified subject by dispersing voice across layers of textuality”. Shakespeare, in Borges’ hands, becomes a palimpsest, a manuscript written over so many times that the original script has vanished beneath the sediment of other stories.
His identity is not stable but sedimentary, layered with the voices of Lear, Macbeth, Rosalind, and Caesar, until the man himself is little more than a shadow cast by his creations. Taken together, these formal and philosophical choices reinforce Borges’ mythic vision, that identity is not a birthright, but a ritual. It is not discovered, but invented, over and over again. Like a role performed under the lights, it flickers into being only for a moment, then vanishes into silence. Borges does not mourn this instability; he mythologizes it. The absence becomes divine, and in doing so, Everything and Nothing becomes not a biography, but a scripture of becoming.
To fully understand the implications of Everything and Nothing, one must place Borges within the fractured cultural landscape of mid-20th-century Argentina, a nation suspended between memory and reinvention, between the authoritarian pressures of the past and the uncertain promises of modernity. Borges was writing in the shadow of rising Peronism, a movement that, for all its populist appeal, relied on the mythologizing of national identity, the consolidation of power, and the erasure of pluralistic voices.
Intellectuals like Borges, skeptical of dogma in any form, found themselves alienated from the rhetorical machinery of nationalism. His literary project, especially in pieces like Everything and Nothing, becomes an indirect but potent critique of identity as something constructed, imposed, and hollow at its core. In this light, Borges’ rendering of Shakespeare takes on a political valence. Shakespeare is not just a literary figure, but a symbol emptied of self and filled with others, a man who has become a myth precisely because he lacks a definable center.
“There was no one in him,” Borges declares, and this absence is not just metaphysical, but cultural. In a society desperately struggling to name itself, be it through slogans, heroes, history textbooks, Borges offers a portrait of a man who bore no name at all. It is a kind of resistance, a refusal to settle for the comforting fiction of coherence. Shakespeare’s hollowness becomes a subtle metaphor for the instability of national narratives and the unreliability of cultural origins.
This gesture is not merely Argentine, but universal. Borges positions Shakespeare’s emptiness as a mirror held up to the world, a world that, having lost its faith in absolutes, sees its own fragmented reflection in the dissolving identity of the Bard. The modern subject, like the modern state, is no longer bound by inherited certainties but must instead contend with dislocation, pluralism, and performance. Borges channels this tension with quiet power, crafting not an argument but an atmosphere, a sense that the scaffolding of selfhood has been removed, and what remains is a stage with no actor, only roles.
Borges’ personal alienation deepens the resonance of this cultural disillusionment. Despite being Argentine, he identified more with European literary traditions than with local political movements, and he often stood at odds with the idea of a singular national identity. His fiction speaks in the grammar of paradox and exile. Thus, Everything and Nothing becomes more than a meditation on Shakespeare, becoming Borges’ confession. The author, too, is ventriloquizing voices, performing selves, slipping between myth and memory. And in that movement, he offers a form of truth that authoritarian systems can neither name nor contain, the truth of multiplicity.
Context and Secondary Sources
At its core, Everything and Nothing is an ontological inquiry wrapped in the elegance of parable. Beneath its slender prose lies a profound philosophical provocation, that the self, long treated as the bedrock of identity and authorship, is revealed to be a fiction, a shifting surface upon which history, language, and performance leave their marks. Borges disguises metaphysics in myth and hides his most disquieting ideas in the folds of a seemingly simple narrative. It is not a treatise, but it thinks like one, it dreams like one. By denying Shakespeare a stable self, Borges aligns the piece with the modernist and postmodernist traditions that fracture subjectivity into ambiguity and dispersion. Identity here is not essence but echo, something that responds, reflects, and refracts rather than originates. This is the crisis of the modern subject: to be not a sovereign interiority, but a collage of roles, signs, and borrowed language. Borges anticipates the logic of thinkers like Derrida and Barthes, who would later proclaim the death of the author. But in Borges’ case, the death is more ritual than rupture.
The most subversive moment in the text arrives not when Shakespeare is dismantled, but when the divine is. In the closing passage, the actor who is now a disembodied echo encounters God Himself. Yet instead of revelation, he receives a reflection. Borges writes, “God had dreamed him, just as He had dreamed all things.” And then, more chilling still, the divine confesses: “I do not know who I am.” With that line, Borges detonates the final illusion, that there exists, somewhere beyond the masks of men, a being who is pure origin, pure selfhood, unmoved and whole.
That illusion crumbles, and the idea that structure of identity, whether human or holy, collapses inward into recursion. The actor dreams characters. The author dreams the actor. And God, in turn, dreams them all. The result is not hierarchy, but spiral, an infinite regression where origin is always elsewhere, always deferred. Borges’ theology is thus deeply existential, and his God is not omnipotent, but ontologically lost. In this collapse of creator and creation into mirrored uncertainty, Borges performs a sacred heresy, that identity, even in its most divine form, is no longer a foundation but a flicker, with the assertion that even the holy is a performance.
In doing so, Borges stretches literature into metaphysical terrain. Everything and Nothing is no longer just about Shakespeare, but about being itself. If even God is a performer lost in his own dream, then what are we. Borges leaves us not with despair, but with the haunting beauty of this recursive freedom, that to exist is not to possess a self, but to become the echo of something not yet named. Daniel Balderston, offers a crucial insight into Borges’ dismantling of the self. He argues that Borges “deconstructs the idea of a unified subject by dispersing voice across layers of textuality”.
This notion reframes Shakespeare not as a biographical subject, but as a function, a discursive aperture through which countless voices pass. The man disappears, and the text remains. In this reading, Shakespeare is less an individual than an event in language, a kind of narrative apparatus through which identities are staged, performed, and forgotten. Borges’ own phrasing supports this interpretation. He writes, “History adds that before or after dying, he found himself in the presence of God, and told Him: I who have been so many men in vain want to be one, myself.” In this confession, if it can be called that, Shakespeare articulates the very dilemma that Balderston describes: he has spoken so many lives into existence that he no longer knows which voice, if any, belongs to him. He is not coherent; he is cumulative. A figure assembled from fragments, echoes, and borrowed scripts.
Borges does not strip Shakespeare of identity merely to render him hollow, but to suggest that identity itself is a ritual of citation. The self, in this light, is an echo chamber, a stage across which masks parade without ever revealing a true face behind them. What we think of as authenticity is simply a well-rehearsed performance, repeated until it feels real. Shakespeare’s genius, then, was not that he expressed himself, but that he made himself vanish beneath the weight of other selves. Balderston’s insight also draws attention again to the formal nature of Borges’ project.
The prose itself is ever recursive, referential, often blurring the boundary between quotation and original voice. Borges writes Shakespeare as if he were already a text rather than a man, a fiction composed of other fictions. His identity is not stripped away; it is overwritten, layered, palimpsestic. What Borges offers is the rendering of the original illegible beneath its accumulated interpretations. Thus, Shakespeare becomes a relic of textuality. His identity, like a sacred manuscript worn thin by centuries of reverence, has become transparent. The voice we hear is not his, but ours refracted. Borges’ deeper maneuver is metaphysical, to suggest that the self is not an origin, but an archive; not a source, but a series of citations. We are all, like Shakespeare, constructed from repetition, quotation, and roles passed down like relics in the dark.
In Borges’ hands, Shakespeare becomes the most potent illusion of authorship precisely because he is so generative, so multivocal, so self-effacing. Borges writes, “He would speak those words in a way that no one could fail to remember, and people would repeat them, not knowing they had been said before.” Here, Shakespeare is not the originator but the conduit through which language recurs. His voice is indistinguishable from the echoes it produces. He is remembered not for his own voice, but for making the voices of others unforgettable. In Borges’ rendering, authorship is less a matter of origination than of orchestration, a harmonizing of existing elements into something that appears new.
This vision radically displaces the notion of literary creation. If Shakespeare had “no one in him,” then what, or who, authored the plays? Borges’ answer is recursive; no one and everyone. Shakespeare becomes a cipher through which discourse flows, a mirror that reflects whatever face is turned toward it. In this way, Borges subverts the sacred aura surrounding the figure of the author. Authorship is not a soul poured into language, but a performance that disappears behind its roles.
Thus, Borges interrogates not only literature, but the soul of authorship itself. What we celebrate in the author may not be their essence, but their absence, their ability to vanish so completely into the page that we forget they were ever there. Shakespeare’s greatness, in Borges’ formulation, lies not in his presence but in his silence. He authored not by asserting selfhood, but by erasing it, making room for the infinite plurality of characters who would speak in his place.
In giving Shakespeare no core, Borges gives us a mirror. We recognize ourselves not in the solidity of the man, but in his dissolution. Shakespeare becomes a figure of uncanny intimacy because his absence feels familiar. We, too, are fragmented, echoing beings composed of memory, influence, inheritance, and invention. Our identities, like his, are performances layered over silence, masks passed down and worn until they begin to feel like skin. Borges writes not only about the Bard, but through him, about all of us.
This is Borges’ deeper gift: to translate erasure into empathy. His prose does not lament the loss of the authentic self; rather, it honors vanishing as a sacred act. The text reveres disappearance—not as a void, but as an opening, a spaciousness in which multiplicity can breathe. Shakespeare’s nothingness is not absence but possibility. In becoming no one, he became everyone. In his writing of the hollow, we hear the echo of our own condition. We are not what we are, but what we perform. We are not originators, but receivers, remixers, inheritors.
Interpretation and Significance
Borges renders the Bard not as a singular genius, but as the everyman of the existential age. Shakespeare, in Everything and Nothing, is not a subject but a stage, not a sovereign soul but a scaffolding for the voices of others. This dissolution is not a literary trick but a philosophical gesture, one that reverberates far beyond the page. Borges strips away the illusion of the stable self not to destroy identity, but to unmask its true nature: fragile, performative, collective, and recursive. In a world increasingly mediated by masks, be they digital, political, cultural, his vision has never felt more urgent.
We are now living in a time defined by performance. The boundaries between self and role, between sincerity and spectacle, are collapsing. In a landscape dominated by social media, influencer culture, and algorithmically-curated identities, we no longer present who we are, but rather we perform who we wish to be seen as. Like Shakespeare in Borges’ parable, we become vessels through which language, aesthetics, and opinion flow, often without clear origin or authorship. Each post, each selfie, each tweet is a tiny audition, an echo of something that has already been said. And yet, paradoxically, this performance does not unify us, but rather I would argue it isolates. The very platforms that promise connection become echo chambers, ushering each of us into algorithmic solitudes where our own reflections are mistaken for reality.
Borges’ Shakespeare foretells this dilemma with eerie precision. The man who “was not able to be anyone” and yet “was each one of us” is not just a literary metaphor; he is a prototype of the digital self. Just as Shakespeare dissolved into his characters, we dissolve into our avatars, our curated personas, our datafied ghosts. And like the Bard, we often reach the end of the performance with a quiet question: who am I, beneath it all? Borges’ answer, devastating and liberating, is that there may be no answer. Identity is not a possession, but a practice, not a source, but a series of performances repeated until they vanish.
This erosion of stable identity also mirrors our political landscape, particularly in the United States, where the post-2016 era of Trumpism has reframed public discourse as theater. In an age where conspiracy thrives, where lies and spectacle carry more weight than truth, the self becomes not a moral center but a brand. Politicians perform authenticity, and voters perform allegiance. Debate becomes performance art, and platforms like Truth Social and X become battlegrounds for curated rage. Borges, writing decades earlier, seems to anticipate this cultural sickness. His vision reminds us that when identity becomes spectacle without substance, politics decays into performance devoid of shared reality.
The irony is profound, in that we are more connected than ever, yet more estranged. We speak constantly, yet rarely listen. We share endlessly, yet remain unseen. Borges writes, “He wanted to be someone, and he could not. Perhaps he was no one, and the game had been too much for him.” This line, ostensibly about Shakespeare, becomes an existential epitaph for our moment. We, too, are caught in a game, a game of self-construction in a world where every utterance is archived, every opinion judged, and every silence filled by an algorithm eager to complete our sentences.
And perhaps, like Borges’ Shakespeare, we are exhausted by the performance. We long to be someone, but we do not know how. Yet Borges shows us that performance is not inherently deceitful, nor is the loss of a stable self necessarily a tragedy. Everything and Nothing gestures toward a different kind of authenticity: one born not of fixed identity, but of humility in the face of flux. Shakespeare’s greatness, in Borges’ eyes, lies not in who he was, but in what he allowed others to become. Likewise, our own salvation may not lie in retreating from performance, but in performing with awareness, with reverence for the roles we inhabit, and a willingness to let others speak through us, not just to us.
In this way, Borges diagnoses an age while describing but a man. He maps the terrain of a post-self world, one in which identity is woven not from essence, but from echoes. His vision leaves us with a difficult but vital charge: to embrace the instability of being without retreating into cynicism or denial. To find meaning, not in the myth of the singular self, but in the fractured, flickering theater of becoming. His vision is too precise, too humane, to lapse into mere disillusionment. Everything and Nothing is not a mourning not of loss, but of illusion.
The portrait he paints is mournful, yes, but deeply reverent. Shakespeare, the man with no self, gave us every self. He became the theater, the stage, the voice behind the curtain, so that others might speak through him. His absence was not a failure, but perhaps a form of generosity. He emptied himself so that others could be full. And in that paradox lies the most haunting truth of Borges’ work: we, too, are echoes. We, too, perform, again and again and again and again and again, not to deceive, but to survive. Not to mask the void, but to answer it.
This is the heart of Borges’ prophecy, that the modern condition is not defined by authenticity, but by echo. In the 21st century, we no longer encounter others as whole selves but as profiles, projections, brands. Our thoughts are filtered through algorithms, and our attention is weaponized. Our beliefs are increasingly shaped not by dialogue, but by the self-confirming logic of echo chambers. The internet promised us connection, but what it delivered was fragmentation, a Babel of curated identities screaming into the void, hoping to be seen, terrified of being forgotten. Borges saw this coming, long before the rise of TikTok, Twitter/X, or virtual influencers.
He understood that when everyone becomes a performer, the stage expands until it encompasses all of life. We have always inhabited the roles handed down by culture, by history, by code. This condition, this erosion of the fixed self, is perhaps human nature, and yet is simultaneously increasingly preyed upon in the modern age. Just as Borges wrote, we too perhaps must reimagine the performance of self in our own time, not as artifice, but as offering. Not as deception, but as the shared ritual of becoming.
Borges teaches us that identity need not be permanent to be meaningful. The self may be built from memory, from imitation, from language passed down like relics in the dark, and yet I do not think this does not make it any less real. I think it makes it more human. We are stitched together by what we inherit and transformed by what we pass on. Like Shakespeare, we are not ourselves alone, we are made of every story we’ve ever told, and every story that has ever been told through us.
This lesson matters now more than ever. In a world convulsed by political tribalism, where truth itself fractures along party lines, Borges reminds us that the dream of a unified self, one immune to contradiction, wholly original, wholly sovereign, is just that: a dream. What we need instead is not a return to some imagined wholeness, but a new ethic of multiplicity. A way of being that honors performance not as pretense, but as participation in the shared text of being human.
Everything and Nothing gives us the language for this ethic, and it does not end with an answer, but with an echo: Shakespeare meeting God, two uncertain beings mirroring one another across the void. In that final image, Borges does not strip us of hope; he strips us of false certainty. And what remains is a silence we might all inhabit together, a shared stage, a vanished author, and the sacred hum of voices not our own, speaking through us, into a darkness made beautiful by the very act of speaking.
The writing of Borges invariably brings me to the fractured theater of American public life. The rise of Donald Trump did not merely signal a political shift, but served to inaugurate a transformation in how public identity is understood, manipulated, and performed. Trump is not a politician in the traditional sense, but a character, a self-curated spectacle whose power lies not in policy, but in persona. His ascent exposed what Borges seemed to understand decades earlier: that in an age of mass media and algorithmic reinforcement, the performance of identity becomes more potent than truth itself. Like Borges’ Shakespeare, Trump is a vessel, but not for universal voices.
Rather, he channels grievance, fear, nostalgia, and rage. He speaks not from a stable ideology, but from a volatile mirror of his audience’s most combustible selves. The irony, however, is that unlike Borges’ empty Bard, who effaced himself so that others might speak, Trump amplifies the illusion of selfhood. He builds myth atop myth, brand atop brand, until the man is indistinguishable from the character. And in this recursive performance, he invites his followers to do the same: to inhabit identities rooted not in reflection, but in allegiance. To become not citizens, but avatars of a culture war in which every utterance is a declaration of loyalty or betrayal.
What Borges might find uncanny is not the political division itself, as division is perennial, but the ontological instability that now defines American civic life. We no longer debate policy; we debate reality. Facts have become performances, and meaning is endlessly deferred through screens, platforms, and viral narratives. In this landscape, identity becomes tribal, and performance becomes weaponized. Borges’ vision of Shakespeare, of “a man who was no one, and so became everyone”, is inverted in Trump’s America: we now have men who claim to be everything, and so become no one.
The stage is crowded, but the silence beneath is deafening. The digital world intensifies this crisis. Social media, once imagined as a tool of democratization, has instead fractured the public sphere into algorithmic archipelagos, echo chambers where performance is constant and reflection nearly impossible. We are, each of us, curating ourselves into caricatures. Borges saw the dream of a self-constructed through repetition, quotation, performance. But unlike the Shakespeare of Everything and Nothing, who vanishes with grace, we cling to our performances with desperation. We mistake volume for substance, visibility for presence.
What results is not connection, but alienation. Our identities, filtered through digital prisms, become both louder and lonelier. We scream into timelines, seek validation in likes and shares, and retreat into ideological fortresses from which no contradiction can enter. Borges, writing before the internet, grasped this existential drift. He wrote not to offer a solution, but to reveal the contours of the condition itself. In Trump’s America, the void that Borges describes, “He wanted to be someone, and he could not”, becomes a national pathology. We want to be seen, but do not know by whom. We want to belong, but only to the reflections of ourselves. We want truth, but only if it confirms the role we’ve already chosen to play.
Borges’ Shakespeare dissolved into voices so that the world might speak. We dissolve into noise so that we might not have to listen. Borges shows us that identity, when let go of, does not annihilate us. It frees us. The emptiness of Shakespeare is not a void of despair, but a canvas. He became the stage, and on that stage, a thousand selves were made possible. Borges offers us not a path back to authenticity, but a new kind of sacredness, a reverence for the self as performance, yes, but also as invitation. An invitation to step out of the echo chambers, to drop the script, to dwell in the fragile silence beneath the spectacle. To see ourselves not as monoliths, but as stories; unfinished, inherited, and open.
For modern readers, all of us living in the age of avatars, algorithms, and autofiction, this reading of Borges feels less like a literary experiment and more like a mirror. We scroll through simulations of self, performing personhood for invisible audiences. We filter our faces, script our captions, align our identities with whatever echo will grant us belonging. We ache for something solid beneath the stage, some kernel of truth untouched by spectacle. But what if, Borges asks, there is nothing solid? What if the search for the “authentic self” is not a journey inward, but a spiral outward, into language, into culture, into the roles we inherit and revise?
In Everything and Nothing, Borges imagines that Shakespeare, man of a thousand tongues, was himself only a whisper, a vessel, a dream. “God had dreamed him, just as He had dreamed all things,” Borges writes. And in that recursive image, where dreamers dream each other without origin, Borges dissolves the boundary between self and world, author and actor, identity and imagination. It is a quiet apocalypse: not the end of being, but the end of the illusion that being is fixed.
This is not a nihilistic vision. Borges does not despair in the face of the void. The emptiness of the self is not its annihilation, but its canvas. Shakespeare, in vanishing, made space for others to speak. So too must we learn to hold space, for contradiction, for multiplicity, for becoming. In a world ravaged by polarization, where politics devolves into performance and technology carves us into curated silos, this ethic feels vital. We cannot retreat to the myth of coherence. We must, instead, embrace the dignity of fragmentation.
To live, Borges suggests, is not to discover who we are, but to participate in the vast play of selves that unfold across time. We are not authors, but author-functions. Not beings, but becomings. Our truths may be provisional, our identities porous, but our stories, like Shakespeare’s, may still speak for others. And perhaps that is enough. Perhaps we must each write ourselves anew in every moment, and to vanish with grace into the chorus of human becoming.
Works Cited
Balderston, Daniel. Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges. Duke University Press, 1993. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11smshd
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Everything and Nothing.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, New Directions, 1964, pp. 247–248.
