Borges's affinity for the "cult of courage" (a phrase he took from the poet Evaristo Carriego) stretches across four decades of fiction-writing to 1970, when he filled the stories of Doctor Brodie's Report with duels and death. These primeval battles take on, by accumulation, the look of legend or myth and seem to celebrate Argentina's heroic, violent past—her national glory and tragedy.

But Borges's fascination with bravery is much more than a preoccupation with national history, fighting, and physical bravado. In a duel to the death a man comes to grips with destiny, which sweeps aside all the moral and philosophical complexities of this confusion called life….

Borges's preoccupations with bravery, then, is not based on admiration of combat nor on defense of the right. Alongside his cult of courage, moreover, we must put his cult of cowardice and treachery. In a number of stories he draws our...