原文 Original text
繁體 Traditional
Reader's edition
且聽下回 Listen to the Next Telling
畢竟不知有何話說，端的怎麼脫身，且聽下回分解。毕竟不知有何话说，端的怎么脱身，且听下回分解。
逐句解 Line by line
畢竟不知有何話說，端的怎麼脫身，且聽下回分解。
毕竟不知有何话说，端的怎么脱身，且听下回分解。
In the end there is no knowing what was said, or just how he got himself free; listen to the telling in the next chapter.
The storyteller's sign-off, unchanged in a hundred chapters: 且聽下回分解, "listen to the next instalment for the explanation." 分解 is untangling a thing and laying it out, with 分 as fēn. 端的, duān dì, is "just how, exactly how." The formula is a survival from the days when this was told aloud for money, and it does the same job an episode's closing credits do: stop here, and come back.
The chapter ends with a hand closing on a wrist. Wukong has come down from safety to offer himself to the cauldron; the Great Immortal, who has caught him twice and held him neither time, takes hold of him; and the storyteller cuts.
The standoff is genuinely unresolved, and both parties know it. The abbey cannot hurt him — whip, oil and rope have all been tried — and he cannot get his master out. Force has been exhausted on both sides, which is exactly the position the story needs to reach before it can offer the only thing that will work: not an escape, but a cure. The tree can be brought back, as Wukong guessed forty passages ago, and Chapter 26 is the search for the remedy.
The formula that closes it, 且聽下回分解, is worth a moment. It is a professional storyteller's line, spoken at the point in the evening where the audience is most likely to pay to hear the rest, and the novel keeps it long after it stopped being read aloud. Four hundred years later it is still doing its job.