Self, Family, Nation

The chapter sets ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ within the matrix of Romantic nationalism in several locations including South America in the 1820s, after the Battle of Junín was fought and won in the Andes. Going on to consider locations such as Greece and Poland at the time of the Second World War, the chapter argues that Borges’s kernel of a story permits comparisons in terms of history and political development, between those locations and Ireland on the one hand, and Argentina on the other. The time of writing endows Borges’s story with pointed contemporary relevance in which the Argentine military establishment is discredited. The chapter incorporates some additional material connecting members of the Borges family line to the history of Argentina as a postcolonial nation.