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.