empathize with the narrator, and ultimately revealing the narrator to be a monstrous creature, Borges adds "a newly aesthetic, historicized twist" to the Minotaur's mythology. By the end of the story, "the reader feels sorry for the monster". Themes Monstrosity and humanity Through the character of Asterion, Borges explores the qualities that define one as monstrous or human. Borges does not shy away from increasingly explicit references to Asterion's monstrous nature, including the terror he inspires in the townspeople and his ritual of slaughtering the young men. Yet Asterion is seemingly unaware of his monstrous nature, and the emotions that he describes—loneliness, pride, hope—are more human than monstrous, eliciting sympathy in readers rather than horror. The humanization of Asterion has the opposite effect on the reader's attitude toward Theseus; the mythological hero becomes the murderer of a pitiful creature who does not even resist him. Borges thus blurs the line between human and monster; Asterion is no more monstrous for killing the young men than Theseus is for killing Asterion. Death and redemption Borges commented on Asterion in a 1969 interview, saying that the character "knew all the time there was something awful about him, so he must have felt thankful to the hero who killed him". His longing for death, and freedom from his labyrinth, mirrors that of the immortal protagonist of another of Borges's short stories, "The Immortal", and is reflected in the painting by Watts that inspired "The House of Asterion". Asterion's suggestion that he is delivering his victims from evil indicates that he believes the world to be evil, and that, in killing the men, he is actually saving them. His apparent belief that life is evil, and death is liberation from that evil, foreshadows his eventual defenseless surrender to Theseus's sword. Asterion's allusion to the Lord's Prayer leads to his final thoughts, which regard his own anticipated savior and take on a distinctly biblical tone. His insistence that "I know that my redeemer lives and he will finally rise above the dust" parallels Job's exclamation in the Book of Job: "For I know my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon earth". Borges's deliberate quotation of Job indicates that Asterion considers his redeemer to be akin to a supreme God, who will take him to "a place with fewer galleries and fewer doors" (i.e., heaven). Reception "The House of Asterion"