Like many works of literary fiction, "Pierre Menard" involves layers of discourse within discourse. For instance, Borges writes a sentence in which his narrator cites a letter from Menard. In that letter, Menard cites a line from Poe's "To Helen" (1848) in which the poem's speaker declares, "Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!"

Many of these instances of nested discourse are explicitly signaled by the text and allow for non-ambiguous description and sorting. For example:

"Pierre Menard," however, also contains several instances of silently nested discourse, as Borges incorporates into his text fragments of unmarked translation from Paul Valéry and Stephane Mallarmé. In contrast to the previous instances of textual nesting, where a character knowingly and explicitly reproduces an author's words, the level at which these silent instances occur is ambiguous. Readers might assume with reason that the Symbolist poet Menard knowingly 0alludes to or plagiarizes the words of his fellow Symbolists. But this state of affairs is not clear or certain. Possibly he acts unconsciously or his words just happen to echo or replicate those of his associates (it is possible that for some reason he has read their poetry but kept away from their essays and correspondence). Or possibly the acts of silent reference take place only at the authorial level, that is, in our world but not in Menard's. In this case, Borges quotes and translates phrases of Valéry and Mallarmé but makes them, in the world of "Pierre Menard," the original phrases of his character. Each interpretation seems plausible and thematic within the context of this tale.

Thus: