綁在柱上 Bound To The Pillar
行者聽說,又輕輕的爬過西廊,真個那獃子綁在柱上哼哩。行者近前道:「八戒,認得我麼?」八戒聽得聲音,知是行者,道:「哥哥,怎麼了?反被這廝捉住我也。」行者听说,又轻轻的爬过西廊,真个那呆子绑在柱上哼哩。行者近前道:「八戒,认得我么?」八戒听得声音,知是行者,道:「哥哥,怎么了?反被这厮捉住我也。」
逐句解 Line by line
Hearing this, Pilgrim crawled softly across to the western gallery, and sure enough there was the idiot, tied to a pillar and groaning.
哩 stands at li by the corpus-wide ruling, where pypinyin gives a level-tone lī; it is the vernacular sentence-final that leaves an action still going on. 獃子 keeps 子 at the neutral zi. 真個 here introduces nothing and simply means sure enough. Four of the chapter's six do no introducing at all, and this is the last of them; the remaining two are verse tags.
Pilgrim came up close and said, "Eight Rules, do you know me?"
認得 takes 得 at dé, the full verb: recognition is something attained, and the corpus rules the whole family — 聽得, 聞得, 記得, 曉得 — the same way. The unit carries its own attribution and closes its own quotation, so it stands alone however short.
Eight Rules caught the voice and knew it for Pilgrim's, and said, "Brother, what has happened?
聽得 takes 得 at dé for the same reason as 認得 in the segment before it — two members of one family, three graphs apart. 了 is the sentence-final particle le. He knows the voice without seeing anything, which is the whole point of the disguise being a crab.
Instead I have been caught by the fellow myself."
A quote-closing tail at exactly eight graphs, and the threshold for joining such a tail backwards is UNDER eight — so it stands alone. This is the second time the chapter has landed on that boundary, after 走上來,吃老爺一棒。」 in the fight scene. 反 is the adversative, on the contrary. No graph in this segment stands in any guard roster.
The rescue opens with a crab crawling along a gallery, and the novel keeps the disguise physically present the whole time: he crawls, he comes up close, and he speaks. Eight Rules identifies him by voice alone, which is the only sense available to a prisoner tied to a pillar in the dark.
怎麼了 — what has happened — is the first thing he says, and it is a question about Pilgrim rather than about himself. The complaint comes second and is put with a certain dignity: instead of the thing I went to do, I am the one who was caught. There is no request for help in it.