What defines obsession? When does an interest become a problem? Everyone has things they enjoy, some things they truly love. But when someone stays inside for weeks watching and rewatching every episode of Friends, their innocent hobby starts to have detrimental impacts on their life. This is an incident that also occurs in Book of Sand, a story about a man who finds a book with an infinite number of pages. In the short story, Book of Sand, author Jorge Luis Borges uses a pessimistic tone to show how obsession is both mentally and socially destructive.
The description of the book creates a pessimistic tone. Later after the narrator buys and analyses the book, he realizes he has become obsessed with it. He states, “The book was monstrous. It was cold consolation to think that I, who looked upon it with my eyes and fondled it with my ten flesh-and-bone fingers was no less monstrous than the book,” (122). His eerie diction, such as ‘“flesh-and-bone fingers”, shows a bleak view and emphasizes the impermanence of human life. This hopeless attitude is also found in his description of both himself and the book as monstrous. He shows how people become as bad as the thing they obsess over, and since his obsession is infinite there is no hope for redemption. Both examples depict human life and obsession as inescapable, a pessimistic view.
The narrator
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This message proves true in Book of Sand, where the extremity of obsession causes effects much like madness. Although the pessimistic tone of the story leads us to believe there is no escape, the ending shows otherwise. The determination to hide the book away for good shows a potentially bright future for the main character. What we, the reader, can learn from this story is the dangers of obsession and the benefits of getting rid of it. If dealt with soon enough, there are ways to prevent obsession from causing long term