Despite the largeness of these themes, most of Borges's stories are short, and some are very short. Borges published a number of volumes of stories over the decades, and all of them appear in Collected Fictions in chronological order. Death, often gruesome, seems to be not just the resolution but the point of these careers conducted for the sake of notoriety. This vertiginous search for a nonexistent account of a nonexistent planet leads to fantastic descriptions of an imagined civilization that, in eerie and finally alarming ways, turns out to mirror our own. A stringent morality stands behind Borges's fictionalized searches.
Later stories go farther.
In short, far from evading reality, as Marquez charged, Borges uses his bookish imagination to investigate the human penchant for, precisely, evading reality. To accomplish this, he seduces us back into Plato's cave of images, the false but alluring world of shadows from which we can learn, at great labor, properly to evaluate objects and events in the world of blinding light. If Borges did not write about himself or about Argentina the way some of his fellow Latin Americans desired him to, he accomplished something grander and more enduring. One of our last true humanists, living through languages, books, and history, he condensed into unforgettable fictions the experience of intellect speaking to and about the world. This alone ensures his place as a matchless man of modern letters.