The second part of the story is a description and explanation of what the narrator regards as far and away Menard's greatest accomplishment, invisible though it may be. "I turn now," he says, "to [Menard's] other work: the subterranean, the interminably heroic, the peerless. And—such are the capacities of man!—the unfinished." Yes, such are the capacities of man that men don't finish their work. But small ironies such as this aside, what is perhaps the "most significant [work] of our time," the narrator tells us, "consists of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the first part of Don Quixote and a fragment of chapter twenty-two." Menard has written a Quixote, or at least part of a Quixote, that is word-for-word identical with Cervantes' but not identical with Cervantes'. To say as much is to affirm an absurdity, the narrator admits, but Menard is capable of...