Borges

Jorge Luis Borges is another author who wrote in the magical realism genre of literature. However, unlike the other authors I've written about, Borges talks about how you can change your reality if you really believe that your past events have changed. For example, in "Emma Zunz", Borges tells a story of a young girl out for revenge. Emma plans to murder Loewenthal, a man who caused Emma's father to commit suicide and go to prison. So in order to proceed with her plan, she has sex with a very unpleasant man (a generous way of putting it) and then goes to Loewenthal to have him killed. But after she kills him and calls the cops, she tells the officers that he had raped her and she killed him because of it.

This is a pretty standard story structure until the end when Borges says, "True was Emma Zunz' tone, true was her shame, true was her hate. True also was the outrage she had suffered: only the circumstances were false, the time, and one or two proper name." Emma Zunz didn't just do those things and moved on with her life; she actually believed that Loewenthal raped her and that was the reason he had to die. Because she believed her reality had changed, so did her path in life. She went from murderer to victim because she actually believed she was a victim. Emma went from William Wallace to Princess Peach because she believed it to be true. This is similar to perspectives from Alfred Adler. He believed that prior experiences weren't as important as how we perceived them. I can relate to that seeing as, when I was five years old, I cut my own hair. However, to make myself avoid trouble, I blamed my brothers for it and I actually believed that to be true. I changed my reality by believing that different sets of events had happened in my life, and not what was true.