A student writes, “The entire first page of Borges’s short story “The South” is completely irrelevant to everything that happens after.”

And later, “Borges obviously didn’t know hot to explain this legitimately, so he just came out with something completely improbable.”

And then some more, “Obviously, not enough planning on the writer’s part went into the creation of this short story.”

I wrote “let’s not condescend to Borges” in the comments. Is there anything else I can add?

A healthy self-esteem is great but I’m not sure how healthy it is to consider oneself so much smarter than Borges.