"[2][4] The man eventually narrows the group of students down to a boy who resembles him, but soon finds himself stricken with insomnia and unable to continue dreaming.

Fire demands that after the conjured man's education is finished he be sent to another ruined temple downstream "so that in this deserted edifice a voice might give glory to the god.

Though the man still worries his son will find out his true origins, his fears are interrupted by a forest fire that emerges from the south and envelops the ruined temple.

"[11][12] According to Borges scholar Mac Williams, the main character of the dreamer explicitly uses the language of Zoroastrianism, in which fire is considered the purest element.

[13] Scholars have also noted the story's similarity to the kabbalistic Jewish legend of the golem, in which mortal men are able to recreate the moment of the divine creation of life.

[14][11] For the story's theme that life may only be a dream or illusion, critics have noted antecedents including Plato's Timaeus (c. 360 BCE), William Shakespeare's The Tempest (c. 1610), Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño (1635), Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger (1908), and John Fowles's The Magus (1965).

Though the story's dreamer believes he is creating another man in a supreme act of self-assertion, the experience paradoxically leads him to realize he is himself a dream, shattering his sense of identity.

[1] Critic David C. Howard argues that Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez was influenced by this story and other work by Borges in the writing of his 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad), in which several characters are able to dream people or events into existence.

[16] Along with another Borges story, "The Secret Miracle", "The Circular Ruins" was an influence on the Christopher Nolan science fiction film Inception, in which characters move between reality, dreams, and dreams-within-dreams.