Canonical Classics ← 第六十六回
第六十六回
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The Gods Fall Victim to a Vicious Hand · Maitreya Binds the Demon Fiend

不分勝負
模式 Mode Read Study
拼音 Pinyin Off
字體 Script
原文 Original text 繁體 Traditional Reader's edition

不分勝負 Neither Could Win

gàizhòngzhēngzhànduōshífēnshèngyāojīngyòujiěbāoerxíngzhěyòujiào:「lièwèi。」tàibìngzhòngděngzhīzhīgàizhòngzhēngzhànduōshífēnshèngyāojīngyòujiěbāoerxíngzhěyòujiào:「lièwèi。」tàibìngzhòngděngzhīzhī


逐句解 Line by line

gàizhòngzhēngzhànduōshífēnshèng gàizhòngzhēngzhànduōshífēnshèng

The whole company fought a long while and neither could win.

is fēn. Neither could win — the same deadlock the earlier battle poem reached, and it arrives at the same point in the sequence, just before the bundle comes out.

yāojīngyòujiěbāoer yāojīngyòujiěbāoer

The fiend untied his bundle again.

. Eight characters, and the reader knows exactly what follows.

xíngzhěyòujiào:「lièwèi。」 xíngzhěyòujiào:「lièwèi。」

Pilgrim called out again, "Have a care, gentlemen!"

The quotation is word for word the warning he gave the dragons — take care, gentlemen, courteous address and all — though the narrator's frame around it is shorter this time.

tàibìngzhòngděngzhīzhī tàibìngzhòngděngzhīzhī

The prince and the rest did not know what "have a care" meant.

The edition puts 仔細 inside its own quotation marks here, quoting Monkey's word back as a thing not understood — a piece of punctuation the earlier telling did not use.


總評 Commentary

The whole passage is a repetition, and the novel makes no attempt to disguise it. The deadlock, the bundle untied, the same four-character warning, the same failure to understand it — every beat matches the loss of the dragons, and the warning itself is repeated without a character changing.

One thing has changed. When the dragons failed to understand, the narrator wrote that they did not know what care meant; here he puts the word in quotation marks, as an object of study. The second time round the failure is presented as a problem of vocabulary, which makes it slightly funnier and considerably bleaker.

Monkey has now given the same useless warning twice. He knows what the bundle does and has never once explained it, and the chapter has stopped short of saying so twice in a row.