Juan Dahlmann, the main character in "The South" is a man who has particular pride in his grandfather, Johannes Dahlmann and his Argentinian culture.
Juan has inherited his grandfather's ranch that he dreams of fixing up and living in, however he works in a library and leads a dull life, with the exception of all of the adventures he reads in the books at the library. While in the midst of reading one fascinating book, he hits his head on the corner of a window and begins bleeding. This injury leads him to get septicemia.
After physician's attempts to heal him were unsuccessful, they took him to a sanatorium to get x-rayed. It would seem to me that Juan Dahlmann was having hallucinations due to his septicemia.
His comparisons from his time spent in the sanatorium and his time spent in the south were parallel in the fact that the events were similar to each other. His time spent as the secretary at the library has influenced a hearty imagination for Juan Dahlmann. It seems as though he has intertwined the fiction of the stories he has read and the reality that he faces.
"Tomorrow I will wake up at my ranch, he thought, and it was as though he were two men at once; the man gliding along through the autumn day and the geography of his native land, and the other man, imprisoned in a sanatorium and subjected to methodical attentions (Borges, 2015). He describes his travel to Buenos Aires and all of the things he remembered about the south.
"He suddenly remembered that there was a café on Calle Brasil where there was a huge cat that would let people pet it, like some disdainful deity" (Borges, 2015). In the end, readers are left wondering if he is still being tortured in the Sanatorium or if he has even gone there in the first place.
Borges, J. (2015). The South. In A. Charter's, The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martin's.