Is the significance of Espinosa’s death entirely ironic? Or does he resembleChrist in any important respect?
What will be an ideal response?
Answer: The central question in interpreting Borges’s story is whether it merely depicts a grotesquely ironic misunderstanding or rather suggests a deeper religious vision. Whatever one’s conclusions, it is certain that Borges had a lifelong fascination with the idea of Christ and redemption. Some of his best stories, like “Three Versions of Judas” and “The Circular Ruins,” explicitly concern the Incarnation. Borges never used the Christian mythos carelessly. A narrowly ironic reading of “The Gospel According to Mark” is easy to make. It is an ironic horror story in which the protagonist unwittingly creates the conditions for his own ritual murder. Read this way, the story is quite satisfactory—like a superior episode of <em>The Twilight Zone</em>. The story, however, also allows a deeper, though still ironic religious reading. Here, too, Espinosa is an unwitting Christ-figure, but one understands him not to represent real Christianity but a shallow parody of it. He is a Christ without divinity, a figure whose teaching lacks moral weight and whose death will save no one. When quizzed by the Gutre father about particular points in the Gospel, Espinosa asserts things he does not believe in order to save face. His theology is “a bit shaky,” and so he answers other questions without examining their logical or theological consistency. In his bewildered way, Espinosa enjoys the authority of his divine position, but he neither understands nor deserves it. He is a well-meaning sham, quite unable to comprehend that the Gutres (whom he unmaliciously, but also un-Christianly, considers beneath him) might take matters of salvation seriously. He is a dilettante unsuitably cast in the role of a deity. Although he seems to accept his death meekly (we do not know for sure what follows his realization), he has only the outward features of a redeemer. His dabbling in the divine has not only destroyed him, it has morally corrupted his followers. Espinosa may be a Christ-figure, but he is no Christ.
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