Ray Bradbury "The One Who Waits"
Нет никакого смысла интерпретировать рассказ на родном языке, в данном случае на русском, ибо текст чрезвычайно метафоричен и наполнен знаковыми словами (key-words), к тому же, он довольно короткий. В общем, Рэй Брэдбери "Тот, кто ждёт".
The short-story One Who Waits
is an excellent example of science fiction written by Ray Bradbury (1920—2012), an american author best known for highly
imaginative science-fiction short stories and novels, though he himself rejected this title of science fiction writer. His best
known works are Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles and Something
Wicked This Way Comes.
The setting of the story is
Mars, the time is cannot be determined exactly – it is the future. The story is
told in the first person mostly, when we perceive the text through the main
character’s eyes. Let us close to the content. The story takes place on Mars, ten thousand years
after the protagonist has died. He is mist and moonlight and memory who seizes
the bodies of astronauts who have arrived on the planet and enjoys the life. One by one each of
them dies. The mist remains alive, waiting for another rocket coming, leaving
red marks on space.
The atmosphere of the story is captivating, bizarre and
curious, especially an effect of the entity – fear of the unknown. The subject
matter of the story is life on Mars. The protagonist of the story is an entity,
living in a well, describing which the author resorts to such stylistic devices
and contextual synonyms as: similie I
live like vapour in a stone throat; periphrasis my coolness rises to the objects; again similies I hang like a flower pollen and I fall like rain into the well;
alliteration and polysyndeton I am mist
and moonlight and memory; epithet invisible
and misting in the warm light. The effect which the author creates in such
description of the entity is inaccessibility, permanence and universal power.
I accept the story metaphorically, as there are a lot
of lexical and stylistic devices, affecting the readers’ emotional state:
numerous unextended sentences I wait. I listen. I test the air. I feel
everything., one-member sentences An explosion. Voices. and parallel
constructions I hear a metal crashing. I wait. I listen; One voice. An alien
voice. An alien tongue I cannot know create a strong feeling of loneliness and
abandonment in the universe; anaphora and examples of assonance and
alliteration I don’t move. I don’t do anything but wait; It touches the tongue
in a fine way and the wine with food is warming are the entity’s echo,
appealing to the life on Earth, where people exist. According to the text,
these sensations are prevailing over the reality, which is expressed by the
astronauts’ activity and astronauts themselves. It would be easily to say, that the
protagonist is a fiend and the conflict of the story is about good and evil.
But we consider that the strong position of the text is correlated to the
entity, we observe frame repetition, where both the beginning and the ending
contain repetition And sometimes I sing old songs of this world when it was
young. More than that, the entity can feel everything and it recognizes
everything, but its nature and destination, in contrast to the people, who know
what they are and what is their mission. So the main principles of text
organization are contra- and juxtaposition, repetition and incomplete
representation, the last one is expressed by uttered represented speech and the first one is expressed by the following sentence: the sand is fire and the ship is silver fire in the hotness of the day, where fire of the sand is more resistant, it is an existence of the superior nature and underlines the entity's power, while silver fire is going out smoke which does not exist, but burns out. In
continuation of discussing the people, the most essential fact is that they die.
They die because they don’t accept the entity. And they are not able to do that
– to conceive not just the entity, but space itself: humane understanding with
its meditative interest cannot be realized here. To my mind, it directly refers
to the author’s message: excepting the fact, that Bradbury wanted to die on
Mars, more important for the understanding of the story is people’s awe, when
they face this gulf of existence (the Soul Well), while the entity itself is a unity of a human
being and space, controlling and dominating over the gulf. To make a conclusion
I would like to say, that in comparison with other people, the author is
directed to the exceptional and universal unity, the symbol of future and new
world every person is going to join.
