Borges's famous fictions were personal, autobiographical, and deeply felt. He was once asked if he intended his stories to be cold and impersonal, and he denied such an intention: ‘I have felt them so deeply that I have told them, well, using strange symbols, so that people might not find out that they were all more or less autobiographical. The stories were about myself, my personal experiences.’ Borges suffered a number of difficulties and some major traumas in his life, and this monograph argues that the pain he suffered from these situations is expressed within his creative writing by means of ‘strange symbols’, and other disguises such as metaphors and parables. Indeed, many of the main events of his life served as structuring devices for his fiction.

Jorge Luis Borges was born in 1899 in the centre of old Buenos Aires. His mother, Leonor Acevedo, had an old criollo Argentine lineage. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was half Argentine and half English. The previous grandeur of the family had faded, and when he was two, they moved to Palermo, a rough district on the edge of the city close to the pampa. Borges had a younger sister, Norah, with whom he played in their large garden. He was close to both of his grandmothers, who recounted stories about his warrior ancestors and the past glory of the family within nineteenth-century South American history. In adult life Borges often felt a sense of inadequacy in relation to his male ancestors, many of whom had been successful military men, or even heroes. His English grandmother had been married to Colonel Borges, who died in battle on the Argentine pampas in the frontier warfare with the Indians; he left two infant sons, one of them being Borges's father. His Argentine grandmother was the daughter of Colonel Isidoro Suárez, a military hero who led the cavalry charge in a famous battle to liberate South America from the Spanish; he later married Jacinta Haedo, from an old Uruguayan landowning family.