Abstract Ben Okri’s ‘The Comic Destiny’ from Tales of Freedom (2009. London: Random House) is a sobering modern fable that represents a new form of dialogue within the context of dispossession, slavery (in its broadest terms) and fragmented human relationships. Okri confronts familiar history across borders. Profoundly affected by the Nigerian Civil War, Okri confesses to a preoccupation with justice, a key theme in the story. For Okri, a poet-seer, justice alludes to the existence of the ideal lying beyond reality, within a proto-rationalistic worldview. This article briefly discusses the fable as fictional mode and the symbolism of the forest as setting.This is a contribution to clarifying Okri’s gnomic fable with reference to the use of literary, historical and imaginative moral echoes. It suggests that the text contains allusive cross-references to his own Starbook (2007) and Samuel Beckett’s Play, reproduced as a film called Comédie.There are faint echoes too of Dante’s Divine Comedy, originally entitled Comédie. This reading is deduced from the meaning of comédie coupled with the title, thrust and setting of ‘The Comic Destiny’, with its largely unnamed, world-weary dramatis personae lost in an infernal clearing in the forest. Employing the stichomythic dialogic stance of Greek tragicomedy, this modern fable dramatizes the way in which personality tends to obstruct reception and communication. Beckett’s thesis is that language perpetuates a communicative impasse, while perception is marred by the observer’s infecting the observed with his or her own mobility. Okri goes ‘beyond’ Beckett’s separate dynamisms; he exposes the iniquities of slavery, broadly speaking, and the paradoxical resilience of the enslaved, and he hints at a redemption of suffering, through an imaginative quest to regain our true state of being.

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恢复我们的真实存在状态：Ben Okri 的寓言“喜剧命运”

摘要 Ben Okri 的《自由的故事》（2009 年。伦敦：兰登书屋）中的“喜剧命运”是一个发人深省的现代寓言，它代表了在剥夺、奴隶制（最广泛的术语）和支离破碎的人际关系背景下的一种新对话形式。Okri 跨越国界面对熟悉的历史。受到尼日利亚内战的深刻影响，奥克里承认对正义的关注是故事的一个关键主题。对于诗人预言家 Okri 而言，正义暗指在原始理性主义世界观中存在超越现实的理想。本文简要讨论了作为虚构模式的寓言和作为背景的森林的象征意义。这是参考使用文学、历史和想象的道德回声来澄清 Okri 的格言寓言的贡献。它表明文本包含对他自己的 Starbook (2007) 和塞缪尔贝克特的戏剧的暗指交叉引用，复制为一部名为喜剧的电影。但丁的神曲也有微弱的回声，最初名为喜剧。这种解读是从喜剧的含义以及“喜剧命运”的标题、主旨和背景中推导出来的，其中大部分未命名、厌倦世界的戏剧人物在森林中的地狱般的空地上迷失了。这部现代寓言采用希腊悲喜剧的古怪对话姿态，戏剧化了个性阻碍接受和交流的方式。贝克特的论点是语言使交流僵局永久化，而观察者用他或她自己的流动性感染被观察者会损害感知。Okri 超越了贝克特的独立活力；