Editing Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (section)

===Literary themes===
In the context of the imagined world of Tlön, Borges describes a school of [[literary criticism]] that arbitrarily assumes that two works are by the same person and, based on that, deduces things about the imagined author. This is similar to the ending of "[[Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote]]", in which Borges's narrator suggests that a new perspective can be opened by treating a book as though it were written by a different author.

The story also plays with the theme of the love of books in general, and of [[encyclopedia]]s and [[atlas (cartography)|atlas]]es in particular—books that are each themselves, in some sense, a world.

Like many of Borges's works, the story challenges the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. It mentions several quite real historical human beings (himself, his friend [[Adolfo Bioy Casares|Bioy Casares]], [[Thomas de Quincey]], et al.) but often attributes fictional aspects to them; the story also contains many fictional characters and others whose factuality may be open to question.