Kafka and Borges in the “The Secret Miracle”
Kafka and Borges in the “The Secret Miracle”

Summary/Abstract: The centerpiece of this essay is an analysis of Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Secret Miracle,” set in Prague during the first few days of Czechoslovakia’s occupation by the Nazis. I argue that the protagonist of the story is a fictional amalgam of Kafka’s biography and Borges’ own; and that Borges’ creative process draws on his literary engagements with Kafka, including his assimilation of the Book of Job through the prism of Kafka. The essay begins with a synopsis of Borges’s views on Kafka, which changed over the years; and it explores the historical circumstances in Europe and Argentina that inspired the story. Notwithstanding the astute borrowings from Kafka’s writings and biography, Borges’s story ends with a decisively Borgesian turn: his own denouement to a literary theme he shares with Kafka, namely, the punishment of the guiltless.

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