Borges enjoyed using word play; as an Ultraist, he used words sparingly in his works while delivering a high impact of meaning. This can be seen in the story’s title, which not only describes the physical location of the story—a temple in the shape of a circle—but also refers to “The Circular Ruins” as a metaphor for creation.

Circles appear throughout the story, forming a motif that Borges uses to tie different elements together. He first describes the temple as a “circular enclosure, crowned by the stone figure of a horse or tiger” (214). Then, when the protagonist starts to dream, he is surrounded by “a circular amphitheater, which [is] somehow the ruined temple” (216), highlighting how, in dreams, objects can be two things at once. Later, the protagonist prays to the temple statue twice a day, “imagining perhaps that his unreal son perform[s] identical rituals in other circular ruins, downstream” (224).

Some of the text’s circular symbols are less obvious. The dreamer waits for a full moon when he is resting in preparation for his second attempt at dreaming a man into being, and he prays to “planetary gods.” The separate paths embarked upon by the dreamer and his son create a circle, with one dreamed being leaving for the other island each time the cycle of creation is perpetuated.