The Lottery in Babylon

In the Lottery of Babylon, Borges continues to explore the binary of reality and fantasy and the concept of infinity. As with traditional magic realism texts Borges continues to employ the first point of view, thus engaging the reader. Within the story Borges blends the borders of many binaries, and continues to force the reader to reexamine their common beliefs and challenge what one accepts as mere fact. While the primary binary remains fantasy versus reality, some of the other binaries that are blended in this matter includes: fate versus chance, luck and misfortune, right and wrong.
The lottery began as a simple and regular lottery, where citizens would buy tickets and a committee would then pick a winner at random. The given prizes and circumstances of the lottery only appealed to a handful of citizens, so Babylon’s citizens’ participation and interest in the matter soon disappeared. As a result the company, a company that took control of the lottery and opened it to all citizens free of charge, changed the lottery to incorporate punishment and further evolved it to appeal to a greater majority.
As the lottery evolved further and further it began to dictate more and more of the citizens’ lives. With the company’s progressing involvement, the company appeared to progressively become more and more representative of a government. As a government, the company continuously changed the rules or laws governing the lottery based upon the requests of the masses. Like a government the company played a significant role in the lives of the citizens’ and had the ability to both punish and reward them. With the evolvement of the lottery the citizens’ become more and more reliant upon the lottery to determine their fate. The citizens’ obsession with this game of chance s quite contradictory with the fact that they “are great admirers of logic, and even of symmetry.” The lottery gives a citizen the opportunity to participate in a game of chance and let all citizens be equal in determining their fate.
The citizens’ desire to participate in such a feat could also be attributed to the time during which the story was written. With the start of the 1940’s, World War II and all of its associated terrors was introduced to the world. In this new decade ones future was not determined, and whether one would live or die tomorrow was far from certain. In this world of uncertainty and fear, it would only be rationale for the Babylonians to desire to participate in an event they had a choice of whether they wanted to attend, which is more than could be said about the war. The lottery would be an escape from the citizens’ real world, and gave them a possibility of not only dying on the war front but also the chance of obtaining riches.
This idea of many possibilities leads to another concept Borges never fails to address, the concept of infinity. There are so many possibilities, such an array of outcomes that could determine one’s fate from the lottery ticket that “the number of draws is infinite. No decision is final; all branch into others. The ignorant assume that infinite drawings require infinite time; actually, all that is required if that time be infinitely subdivisble”. The number of possibilities will always remain infinite, for even in any given outcome there remain an infinite number of details that determine the exact situation.
At the end of the story the reader, as with many other Borges stories, is brought to question the existence of the company in general, thus once again eroding the boundary between reality and fantasy. Whether or not the company existed is debatable, but the citizens’ tend to agree, “Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance”.