The Garden of Forking Paths

The story opens with an unnamed narrator explaining that the text that follows is a partial deposition dictated by Dr. Yu Tsun. The narrator states that the details of the deposition explain why a particular British offensive in World War I was delayed several days by “torrential rain.” The deposition begins mid-sentence, as if missing its opening pages. The speaker, Yu Tsun, describes hanging up the phone and then recognizing the voice of Captain Richard Madden, a British officer, speaking German in the office of Viktor Runeberg, a man who, like Yu Tsun, is a spy for Imperial Germany. Yu Tsun states that this means Madden will have “murdered” or arrested Runeberg and that Madden will likely seek to kill or arrest him next. At this point, a footnote from the editor vehemently denies that Madden murdered Runeberg, stating that instead he killed him in self-defense after Runeberg pulled a gun on him.

Yu Tsun returns to his bedroom and locks the door. He reflects on the likelihood that he will die and on the nature of time before his thoughts return to his hatred of Madden and his satisfaction that he has discovered the secret location where the British army is gathering troops and equipment along the Ancre River in France. Seeing a bird fly by, he imagines airplanes bombing the site. He wonders how to get his information to the Chief, his boss in Germany, before he is killed. He empties his pockets while thinking about what to do, revealing he has a gun with a single bullet. Having come up with a plan, he uses a telephone book to find the location of someone who can pass the information on. Yu Tsun declares himself to be “timorous” and admits that although his plan ultimately works, it is terrible. He goes on to explain that he did not take action out of love for Germany or hatred of English people but rather from a desire to prove to the Chief, who fears Chinese people, that a Chinese man could save his country.

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Yu Tsun leaves his house and takes a cab to the train station, where he buys a ticket for a destination further along the line than his intended stop in Ashgrove. As the train pulls out of the station, he sees Madden running down the platform, having just missed it. Yu Tsun moves rapidly from feeling terror that Madden will see him to ecstatic happiness that he has beaten him to the train. He imagines that means he has won the opening of their duel and that this predicts his triumph. This gives him the courage to believe he can carry out his plan. Even though he believes his plan will end in his death, he spends the train ride planning its steps. When the train arrives at a station, he asks the children there to confirm that it is Ashgrove. After he leaves the train, they ask if he is going to the home of Dr. Stephen Albert and give him directions to get there on foot.

As he walks, he realizes that the directions they have given him, to take every left turn, is the advice for getting to the middle of certain kinds of labyrinths. This leads him to think of his great-grandfather, Ts-ui Pên, who gave up his powerful political position to write a novel and create a great maze. However, at the time of his assassination 13 years later, no one could find the maze, and the novel was considered a senseless failure. Yu Tsun imagines different kinds of fantastic mazes as he walks, forgetting for a while that he is running from Madden. The night is beautiful, and he hears distant music. He considers that one can be an enemy to other people but not hate a country itself. As he reflects on these things, he realizes that the music is Chinese music and that the building he sees is a Chinese pavilion. He attracts attention, and a tall man holding a lantern comes down the walk and greets him at the gate, speaking Chinese and addressing him using the name of a Chinese consul, asking if he has come to see the garden of forking paths, which Yu Tsun identifies as the garden of Ts-ui Pên.

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The tall man invites him in, and together they walk to the house and into the library, a room filled with books and objects from both Europe and Asia. The tall man, Stephen Albert, begins to talk about Ts-ui Pên and tells Yu Tsun he has the labyrinth. He explains that the labyrinth and the novel were not separate ideas of Ts-ui Pên’s but one plan. The book itself is a labyrinth. He shows Yu Tsun a fragment of a letter written by Ts-ui Pên, referring to his “garden of forking paths.” Albert believes that the forking paths refers to the idea of time splitting when a person makes one decision or another. Each decision sets off a different set of possible futures, like paths splitting off from each other in a maze, sometimes meeting up again at particular moments that happen in multiple versions of the future. He reads Yu Tsun two passages from Ts-ui Pên’s novel, each describing an army on the way to a battle. Although they pass different things on their way and come to the battle in different emotional states, in both cases the army triumphs.

Albert goes on to explain that he believes the form of the novel is intentional, not, as the family has long believed, an incomplete series of drafts. Having studied the novel for many years, he has determined that the word time never appears in it, which he takes as an indication that time is its subject, as in a guessing game where the leader will say any word except the one others are supposed to guess. Albert considers the novel Ts-ui Pên’s argument that time, rather than being a singular, linear progression, is an infinite web of paths splitting off and sometimes rejoining one another. Albert explains that in some versions of the current night, the two men meet, while in others, Albert is dead or a phantom. Yu Tsun declares that in all times, he is grateful to Albert, but Albert corrects him, saying that in one future they are enemies. Yu Tsun looks at the garden and imagines it filled with infinite versions of himself and Albert, but when he looks again, he sees only Madden coming up the walk.

Stating that he is Albert’s friend, Yu Tsun asks to see Ts-ui Pên’s letter again. As Albert turns to the writing cabinet to take it out, Yu Tsun shoots him such that he dies instantly. Yu Tsun says that afterward, Madden arrested him and that he has been condemned to death by hanging, but that he succeeded in delivering his message to the Chief. Because the newspapers covered the unexplained murder of Albert by Yu Tsun, the Chief saw in them the name Albert, which is also the name of the town in France where the British army had gathered its troops and equipment. This coded revelation has allowed Germany to bomb the area, the “rain” referred to in the opening of the story. Although Yu Tsun is triumphant at having successfully delivered his message, he ends the story heartsick over having killed Albert.

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