《寓言》简介（福克纳）(2)

A Fable, novel by Faulkner , published in1954 and awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Under the pacifst influence of a corporal and his twelve followers in 1918, a French regiment refuses to attack the Germans, who for the same reason do not counterattack.The commander,concerned with his military record, requests that the entire regiment be executed, but the supreme French general,who knows the corporal to be his natural son and who has come to believe in the inextricable mingling of human rapacity and idealism, heads the tribunal considering the case. Wise and not without compassion, yet utterly cynical, he sees war not only as a political and economic necessity but as "so long ingrained in man as to have become an honorable tenet of his behavior and the national altar for his love of bloodshed and glorious sacrifice." Having been warned of the pacifist plan by a betrayer among the corporal"s twelve, he collaborates with the German command to resume the war on the continued bases of national hatred and narrow idealism for the armies and people, and a disillusioned yet god-like way of life for the aristocracy of senior officers. Discovering this deception,a young British fⅠyer commits suicide. A British runner is convinced by the corporal"s example that soldiers can end war if they simply throw down their weapons and meet between the lines, and having persuaded a handful of men to follow him, he is horribly injured when artillery on both sides shell the peacemakers. Also killed in this barrage are a taciturn British sentry and a Negro lay preacher, whose remarkable adventure in America with a superb, stolen racehorse is a long interpolated tale. As the local populace turns against the corporal, fearing that the whole regiment will be shot because of him, a re-enactment of the Passion of Christ develops and becomes ramified.Wed to a woman named Magda, and already betrayed, the corporal is denied by the betrayer as he conducts a "last supper" in prison, and then is taken by the old general to a hilltop fortress to be tempted with life at the expense of his exaltcd hope for man"s repudiation of war and urged to abandon "that aberrant and futile dream" that "man