Julia Schwartz

September 14, 2002

The Illusion of Nothingness

“To sleep is to be abstracted from the world” (Borges 5), but for Ireneo Funes, subject of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Funes, the Memorious,” abstraction is not possible. The word ‘abstract’ can be defined as “not applied or practical; theoretical”.[1] In essence, Funes’s existence is entirely practical and theoretical, as allows himself to be fully consumed by the enormous task of classifying all of his memories in hopes of ultimately being able to define them numerically. He cannot do anything but classify his memories while he is awake, and his mind will not let him stop to sleep. Thus, even the simple human function of sleep becomes a momentous one to Funes. “Funes imagined [new unknown houses] black, compact, made of a single obscurity; he would turn his face in this direction in order to sleep. He would also imagine himself at the bottom of the river being rocked and annihilated by the current” (Borges 5). To sleep, Funes virtually has to imagine that he is dead.

Most people think of sleep as comfort, and are afraid of death; however, Funes is afraid of sleeping, afraid of becoming abstracted, so he finds comfort in the sensation of death, and relief in the oblivion provided when he imagines himself in this state. Funes is comforted by this oblivion because it frees him from all the memories that he can’t organize and ultimately, control. The lack of control is worse than death for Funes, because he knows that at his death he needs to be in control of the memories, which is why he devotes his life to doing so after his fall, but at the same time, “he [knows] that at the hour of his death he [will] scarcely have finished classifying even all the memories of his childhood” (Borges 5).

Lieutenant Jimmy Cross of Jim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried also finds relief in oblivion. He is tormented by a different demon than Funes: the gray-eyed virgin Martha. When Cross tries to concentrate on his duties in the war, he can only think of Martha. In order to get rid of Martha, Cross goes into his deep hole in the ground when it is “full dark” (O’Brien 17), and feels “paralyzed… [wanting] to sleep inside [Martha’s] lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered” (O’Brien 11). Cross’s being smothered by the blood of Martha’s lungs is no different than Funes being annihilated by the current of a deep river. Both men find relief and relaxation in nothingness.

Both Funes and Cross are in unreal situations, Funes with his memories and Cross in Vietnam. Both exist in conditions that man originally could never have thought possible and now can hardly consider human. In these inhuman situations, the men have a need to feel human emotion, not the blind devotion to a task they didn’t choose. However, in their respective situations, the only emotion they can force themselves to is the pain of oblivion, which comes upon them when they enter the world of sleep. 

                The difference between war and knowledge is vast, with each causing their respective victims to suffer: Cross suffers from the war, and Funes suffers from his memories. However, while both are greatly tormented in their waking moments, neither tries to find an alternate way out. But what would happen if a man was tormented by war and unreal knowledge? The gateway to Funes’s ultimate knowledge was the “eccentricity…of always knowing the time, like a watch” (Borges 2). Norman Bowker (The Things They Carried) is in Jimmy Cross’s platoon in the war, so he too is suffering from existing in the first inhuman circumstance: the war—but Bowker received another piece of baggage from the war: “the war had taught him to tell time without clocks, and even at night, waking from sleep, he could usually place it within ten minutes either way” (O’Brien 140). Hence, Bowker suffers doubly, and carries twice the weight that Funes and Cross carry.  Bowker’s existence, like Funes’s and Cross’s, is consumed—his existence is consumed by his memories of the war. With the Funes burden of memories and inexplicable knowledge, and the Cross burden of the war, Bowker is not able to be comforted by the illusion of nothingness alone: he needs to reach actual nothingness to find comfort. Bowker does not merely imagine himself dead, he makes himself dead by committing suicide.

                The placement of human men in inhuman situations often causes them to feel things that are not quite human either. Humans are placed on this earth with one goal in mind: to survive. When somebody ceases to live their life according to this goal, the most intensely human aspect of their life has been killed. For Ireneo Funes, Jimmy Cross, and Norman Bowker, this works in the opposite way: finding strange, inhuman knowledge causes them to lose the human goal, and instead of wanting to find comfort in life, they cross to the enemy and yearn for death.