In Las ruinas circulares he confronts this idea head on, and although this story has no basis in reality and little relevance to the Argentinean way of life that looks into in other stories in the collection, I think it is important to look at it briefly, because it is the major theme in one of Borges's most beloved books: 1001 Arabian Nights, a book which the protagonist reads himself in El Sur. The idea raised in Las ruinas circulares is that how can we be sure of the certainty of reality when the protagonist, a sorcerer, who spends the majority of the tale conjuring a son from a dream, himself realises that he is but the dream in the mind of another. With this Borges is saying that we exist in the mind of God in the same way that characters in fiction exist in the mind of the author, and that fiction has as much relevance to reality as reality has to fiction, the two are intertwined. This is true in the heavily influential nineteenth century gauchesque poem by José Hernández, MartÃn Fierro which became and national treasure in Argentina. The poem is based around the gaucho after which the poem is named who became a symbol of Argentine qualities for both the intelligencia and the masses of the country. The role of the gaucho in post colonial Argentinean history was much Romanticised at the time of Borges youth in Buenos Aires, they were identified as pure criollo Argentineans not tainted by the waves of European immigrants that saturating Buenos Aires during its economic boom of the early twentieth century. They had all but disappeared when Borges was writing but where remembered for there skills with cattle and ability in defending honour in knife fights. In MartÃn Fierro the protagonist is an outlaw who kills without reason and provokes knife fights without motive, but is nonetheless seen s the personification of Argentine character, an example of the concept that fiction is more real than reality, since Fierro became mythicised as a legendary Argentinean when in truth he was little more than a criminal.