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"The Immortal" (original Spanish title: "El inmortal") is a short story by noted Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, first published in February 1947,〔 and later in the collection ''El Aleph'' in 1949. The story tells about a character who mistakenly achieves immortality and then, weary of a long life, struggles to lose it and writes an account of his experiences. The story consists of a quote, an introduction, five chapters, and a post script. "The Immortal" has been described as "the culmination of Borges' art" by critic Ronald J. Christ.〔 == Plot summary == Borges begins by quoting Francis Bacon's ''Essays'', LVIII. "Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion." The introduction takes place in London in the first part of June 1929. Herein the following five chapters are purported to have been found in the last of six volumes in small quarto (1715–20) of Alexander Pope's Iliad bought from a rare bookseller named Joseph Cartaphilus. The story is an autobiographical tale told by a Roman soldier, Marcus Flaminius Rufus, during the reign of the emperor Diocletian. During a sleepless night in Thebes, Egypt, a mysterious man, exhausted and wounded, seeks refuge in his camp. Just before dying, he tells Rufus about a river whose waters bestow immortality on whoever drinks from it. The river is next to a place called the City of the Immortals. Determined to find it, Rufus sets out for Africa with his soldiers. The harsh conditions of the trip cause many of his men to desert. After hearing that the remaining soldiers are planning his death, Rufus flees and wanders through the desert. Rufus wakes up from a nightmare to find himself tied up in a small recess on the side of a mountain inhabited by Troglodytes. Down below, he spots a polluted stream and jumps down to drink from it; wounded, he falls asleep. Over the next few days, he recovers and, seeing the City of the Immortals in the distance, is able to walk there, followed by a Troglodyte. The City of the Immortals is an immense labyrinth with dead-end passages, inverted stairways, and many chaotic architectural structures. Rufus, horrified and repulsed by the city, describes it as "a chaos of heterogeneous words, the body of a tiger or a bull in which teeth, organs and heads monstrously pullulate in mutual conjunction and hatred." He eventually escapes the city and finds the Troglodyte who followed him there waiting outside; he names him Argos (after the dog of Odysseus), and decides to teach him language. Soon after, though, Argos reveals that he is Homer, and that the Troglodytes are the Immortals, having destroyed the original City of the Immortals and (on the advice of Homer) replaced it with the labyrinthine one Rufus encountered. Rufus spends centuries living with the Immortals, mostly immersed in thought, until the notion of the existence of a river with the powers to "take away" immortality causes the group to scatter in search of it in the tenth century. Rufus wanders the world, fighting at Stamford Bridge, transcribing the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, and buying the aforementioned edition of Pope's ''Iliad'' in 1714. In 1921, Rufus' ship runs aground in Eritrea while ''en route'' to Bombay, and he drinks from a spring, losing his immortality. In the end, Rufus realizes that he has incorporated the experiences and words of Homer into his tale, but concludes that "I have been Homer; soon, like Ulysses, I shall be Nobody; soon, I shall be all men—I shall be dead." Rufus is, in fact, the bookseller Cartaphilus, who, we learn at the beginning of the story, dies in October 1929 while returning to Smyrna. The story ends with a brief postscript which discusses the fictional book ''A Coat of Many Colours'' by Dr. Nahum Cordovero, which argues that the tale of Rufus/Cartaphilus is apocryphal, on the basis of its interpolations of texts by Pliny, Thomas de Quincey, Rene Descartes, and George Bernard Shaw. The postscript ends with the unknown author of the postscript rejecting Cordovero's claim. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Immortal (short story)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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