The use of repetition as a literary device in A Farewell to Arms

In his novel A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway uses parataxis extensively. With this structure, he avoids creating causal connections in his narration, which is one particular of the most famous aspects of Hemingway’s writing. But the unpredictability that the anti-causal nature of the narrative suggests is counteracted by an additional, significantly less apparent, narrative tool of the author. The unpredictability is counteracted by the extensive repetition that Hemingway employs in the novel, repetition that lastly evinces a globe like somewhat knowable. The central event in the novel is the war, and Hemingway constructs the war to be defined by repeated actions. Just as he constructs the whole war to be comprised of a couple of moves, repeated ad infinitum, Hemingway also styles the narration so that it is defined by recurring events. This starts with the characters’ actions as they correspond to the war, a war which forces them to total the identical social behavior over and more than. Hemingway extends this repetition so that it quickly invisibly and quietly pervades all of the characters’ behavior, even modest private one particular. At some point, even the words of the novel are noticed to return frequently. As Hemingway builds this planet in which every little thing returns, he builds a world in which even the reader is in a position to predict events, dialogue, and descriptions. Hemingway’s technique is not overt, and to see the technique it is essential to closely analyze the actions of the characters that Hemingway designed, with no haphazard, and at each level. After a thorough exploration of Hemingway’s method, the reason that Hemingway creates this somewhat knowable globe surfaces.

Hemingway presents the war as a series of repeated actions from the initial chapter. The most noticeable action is the marching talked about in the initial paragraph, when the narrator, Frederick Henry, remembers that “Troops went by the residence and down the road.” The marching of the troops is so ubiquitous that the narrator oddly makes reference to it twice in the next sentence: “We saw the troops marching along the road and the dust increasing and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching.” Hemingway’s repeated mention of the action reflects the repeated action of the soldiers, who do not even stop when the sun goes down as Henry notes, “Sometimes in the dark, we heard the troops marching” (three). All of the above-mentioned marchings have come in the late summer season, but they continue into the autumn when “the men, passing on the road, marched” (four). In the two pages of the initial chapter, the narrator mentions the marching troops no significantly less than five occasions, and by performing this, Hemingway enables the war to be defined by these peripatetic soldiers. Anytime Hemingway brings the reader into proximity with the war right after this chapter, he usually inserts the anonymous troops producing their way to a usually unspecified endpoint. Simply because of the handful of actions that the soldiers total, the reader slowly comes to expect soldiers to be marching each time they are noticed.

Whilst Hemingway enables his narrator, Henry, to make one reference to an aspect of war outdoors of these marching soldiers in the first chapter, the “flashes from the artillery” in the distance, is nothing at all less than the soldiers, and their endlessly repeated individual actions, that give the war type in the chapter. So does Hemingway in the rest of the novel, exactly where every single person involved in the war finds himself with an assigned activity that he repeats endlessly. Frederick Henry is sent driving his ambulance back and forth in between the front and an ever-changing base. Before even placing down his bags right after returning from a lengthy leave brought on by an injury sustained at the front, Henry is told by his commanding officer, “You can go and take more than the 4 cars on the Bainsizza.” (165). Rinaldi, Henry’s pal who operates on the injured soldiers that Henry delivers, complains that “All summer and all fall I’ve operated. I operate all the time . . .I never think. No, by God, I don’t feel I operate” (167).

Hemingway’s behaviour, a lot more subtly, is quickly associated to these wartime tasks, which also repeat themselves. The meals that the guys consume although on the road is inevitable of two types. The spaghetti in the “basin of spaghetti” late in the book (191), is almost certainly eaten in the identical methodical way as in the early moments of the book, exactly where Henry explains that the only variation was in the way the men ate the spaghetti, some “lifting the spaghetti on the fork till the loose strands hung clear then lowering it into the mouth, or else employing a continuous life and sucking into the mouth” (7). When the men are not consuming spaghetti they are invariably eating bread and cheese besides each meals are eaten with red wine. Only after does Hemingway enable his characters to eat one thing apart from spaghetti or bread and cheese: when Henry and his males are stuck in a tiny farmhouse Piani discover a “long sausage,”and eat it (217). Even contemplating this lack of range, at 1 point the gustatory element is the element that does permit the soldiers to differentiate between numerous actions in the war. Even nominally diverse actions, advances, and retreats become the very same except for the sort of wine that is drunk. For the duration of one particular retreat, an ambulance driver accompanying Henry says, “I like a retreat greater than an advance. On a retreat, we drink barbera” (191). Hemingway constructs a world in which only the kind of alcohol consumed makes it possible for the soldiers to differentiate among the two distinct maneuvers.

But Hemingway extends the impact of the repetitive nature of war beyond behavior directly related to the war. Henry and the other characters all fall into patterns of behavior that become predictably frequent. The two actions that are the most ubiquitous are the drinking of alcohol that occurs anytime any individual gets a totally free moment and the newspaper which tells that Henry does this whenever he is alone. When Henry is injured, the priest from Henry’s base brings him 3 presents. It is no surprise that two are “a bottle of vermouth,” and “English papers” (69). When Rinaldi paid Henry a visit earlier that day his gift was a “bottle of cognac” (63).

Even once Henry reaches the Milan hospital after his injury at the front, Hemingway forces the behavior of each Henry and Katherine Barkley, his soon-to-be wife, into frequently repeated patterns. Right after Henry describes a handful of representative days, mentioning the riding in carriages, the eating at the Gran Italia, the return to the hospital, and the nightly trysts, Henry quietly says, “The summer time went on that way” (117). By this point in the novel, Hemingway can give us one particular sequence of a pattern and we don’t need to have to know any far more, we only need to have to know that it ‘went on that way.’

As much more and more moments repeat themselves, Hemingway fades the lines safeguarding the uniqueness of moments. Unexpected acts are seen to repeat nearly verbatim. When he first arrives at the Milan hospital, Henry finds himself seeking out the window: “The swallows circled around and I watched them [flying] above the roofs” (87). Katherine quickly arrives, and when she does Henry has tiny time to look out the window, but when he is next alone, he looks out the window and “watched the swallows more than the roofs” (113). His solitary swallow watching is a single of the few diversions from Henry’s constant paper reading, but Hemingway tends to make even this oddly certain diversion a repetitive action.

Hemingway areas one more unexpected repeated action in chapter 23. The evening ahead of Henry is to return to the front right after his injury leave, he and Katherine are heading to a hotel in Milan. On the way, they see yet another couple in an alleyway, exactly where the soldier was “standing with his girl in the shadow of a single of the stone buttresses ahead of [Henry and Katherine]. They had been standing tighten up against the stone, and he had put his cape about her” (147). Although Henry responds to the couple by saying, “They’re like us,” Katherine quickly responds by saying, “Nobody is like us,” trying to assert the uniqueness of their union. A few moments later, nonetheless, the two locate themselves standing “in the street against a higher wall,” Henry tells us how Katherine “pulled my cape about her, so it covered both of us” (150). This odd repetition seems to be completed with some agency on the component of the characters, but the fact that this overt recurrence of a specific event is not acknowledged by Hemingway underscores the expectedness of such repetition.

Hemingway mixes this repetition with an odd derivative of repetition, foreshadowing. Moments imagined recur in the book’s reality with tiny agency from the characters. Soon following he meets Katherine in a modest Italian town, Henry dreams of the couple obtaining a much more romantic and private rendezvous. The imagined occasion has a handful of salient characteristics: in the dream, they meet in Milan and go to a hotel exactly where they are taken to their room in “the elevator and it would go up quite slowly clicking at all the floors and then our floor.” As soon as in the space, they drink wine brought by area service (39). Oddly sufficient, when Henry is injured at the front, he is taken to a hospital in Milan, the same hospital to which Katherine takes place to have been transferred. At the end of Henry’s time in Milan, the two go to a hotel for a night. They go up to their area by elevator and “the elevator passed three floors with a click each time.” Once they are in the area, they order dinner and St. Estephe wine (151-153).

Right after all the repetitions in the book, the world seems to grow to be a somewhat knowable location if the crucial actions are repeated ones, it follows that there is a much better likelihood of guessing future actions. This suspicion that the globe developed by Hemingway is somehow knowable and confirmed via the just pointed out, and other, significantly less explicit, moments of foreshadowing. Soon after he is injured, but just before he meets up with Katherine, Henry speaks of the feasibility of facial hair and a single of the officers asks him, “Why don’t you raise a beard?” (77). While this remark is made in passing and would be not possible as a soldier, as soon as he has escaped from the army, Catherine independently asks Henry, “Darling, would you like to grow a beard?” (298), a plea with which Henry complies. Whilst Katherine is in childbirth, Henry eerily sees what will quickly take place when he asks himself, “What if she should die?” (321). Henry has no purpose to feel that Katherine need to die, there has been a little complication when Henry asks this query, and as he reminds himself, “People don’t die in childbirth nowadays” (320). But even with this expertise, he is unable to erase the belief that she will die. In the finish, she does die, and it is from an unexpected hemorrhage that benefits from complications that arise only right after Henry convinces himself that she will die. Henry and Katherine’s whole partnership is basically foreseen prior to there is any cause even to make predictions. Quickly soon after they meet, moments following Katherine slaps Henry for attempting to take the very first kiss, Katherine says in half jest, “You will be great to me, will not you? . . . due to the fact we’re going to have a strange life” (27). How proper she is.

Katherine is capable to make this prediction from previous expertise. It seems that in several methods Henry and Katherine’s whole connection is a repeat of the relationship Katherine was in that preceded the novel, a wartime partnership in which marriage is holding off because of uncertainty. Katherine can predict what a strange connection Henry and hers will be due to the fact of her prior expertise. This observation illuminates an crucial point about the foreshadowing. It does not arise through any prophetic powers. Alternatively, quite simply, it arises since, if actions repeat themselves, it is easier to predict what will take place. Hemingway produces such repetition in the novel so that even his characters have some energy to see what will take place to them in the future.

But this does not explain why there is repetition in the 1st location. To answer this question, it is good to appear at the way Hemingway introduces the repetition of the words in the novel. The dialogue is rife with repetition such as when, in complementing Henry for a very good thought, Aymo, one more ambulance driver, says, “That’s Fairly good, Tenente.” In response Henry says, “That’s quite good” (210). Much more essential than the repetitive dialogue is the repetition of a few straightforward adjectives. The word ‘lovely’ is used endlessly to describe either Henry or Catherine, such as when Henry notes that Catherine “looked beautiful in bed” (258). But it is also employed by Rinaldi to describe himself when he says, “I am becoming a lovely surgeon,” (167) and by Catherine when ironically referring to a rainy night: “It’s a beautiful evening for a walk” (267). The oft-mentioned simplicity of the narrative stems significantly from the excessive repetition of such easy words. The word beautiful, like the words excellent and splendid and good, are used so often that the reader comes to anticipate them anytime an adjectival description is given. It seems that the characters have no decision but to use these words to describe factors. The very same idea applies to the repetition of actions. Henry did not develop a beard because it was cosmically ordained. He grows it since there are so couple of approaches to reinvent oneself within the spartan way of life essential by war. Likewise, Henry does not uncover himself watching swallows since a larger force produced him so that he ought to. Rather, he watches swallows due to the fact there is tiny else to do when lying in a hospital bed. The reappearance of the swallows affirms that there are few possibilities for other action above Italian rooftops.

Hemingway thus creates a globe in which repetition is destined to occur, not since of some larger cosmic scheme, but rather because in the basic planet created by Hemingway, a re-creation of the straightforward globe that Hemingway saw about him, the couple of issues that can possibly take place, have a high probability of recurring because there are so couple of of them.