Comparison Of The Library Of Babel and The Book Of Sand

Ryan Irwin                                                                                                                 September 16, 2013

Comparison Paragraph of The Book Of Sand and The Library Of Babel

            The Book Of Sand and The Library Of Babel are two short stories that both have a common theme of infinity, however, the way the two stories portray this common theme differs. 

          In The Book Of Sand there is a book with an infinite amount of pages, the pages are not in any order, and there is no start or end. In The Library Of Babel there is an infinite library with an infinite amount of books, meaning that every book exists. The “Book Of Sand” exists in a regular world whereas The Library Of Babel takes place in a library that is made up of hexagonal sections of bookshelves that infinitely repeat themselves. In both stories there seems to be a common emotion of madness from the humans that are subject to the “infinity”. In The Book Of Sand the owner of the book goes mad because he cannot get himself to fully believe that the book is truly infinite, despite the fact that the pages seem to come out of nowhere in the book that they hold. In The Library Of Babel the habitants of the library are all subject to madness depending on the way that they live in the library. Some search through the library recklessly looking for the vindications of their lives, and some ponder how the library came to exist and try to understand the fact that the library has always existed, and that it never started and will never end. 

          The main relation between the two stories seems to be the way that humans perceive infinity. The aspect of human madness in each story is a relation to how humans try to perceive infinity in real life; this is because there is no way to make infinity make sense to a human mind. The infinite book, and the infinite library are just different ways to put in perspective the human interactions with infinity.