Babel=World?
Okay so I was kind of confused on the twist here. I think what the narrator is trying to do is compare the library to the world, and that the people in it are like worshipers of a religion. Some seek the meaning of life, the answer to the meaning of life, others seek the messiah, the person who would hold these answers. Some destroy culture, but are ultimately unable to harm the majority of human existence. I think that's what it is saying, but I was kind of confused. Also, why do they us hexagons? It such an odd shape to be the basic concentric shape for the library.
I think that the use of such an odd shape such as a hexagon can be explained when it is mentioned that many people consider it 'inconceivable' to imagine a universe with any other base shape. They assume that the universe can be no other way and thus that there must be some meaning in its structure, but to us the strict rules adhered to in the story seem surreal; we know the universe can be different, which suggests that the hexagons and other rules to which the library is constrained have no absolute meaning.
ReplyDelete