In his novel A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway makes extensive use of parataxis. With this structure, he avoids establishing causal connections in his narration, which is one of the most famous aspects of Hemingway's writing. But the unpredictability suggested by the anti-causal nature of the story is countered by another, less apparent, narrative tool of the author. The unpredictability is counterbalanced by the extensive repetition that Hemingway employs in the novel, repetition which ultimately demonstrates a somewhat knowable world. The central event of the novel is war, and Hemingway constructs war as defined by repeated actions. Just as he constructs the entire war as consisting of a few infinitely repeated movements, Hemingway also constructs narrative to be defined by recurring events. It begins with the characters' actions that correspond to the war, a war that forces them to engage in the same social behavior over and over again. Hemingway extends this repetition so that it soon invisibly and silently permeates all the characters' behaviors, even the most intimate. Ultimately, even the words from the novel seem to come up frequently. As Hemingway constructs this world in which everything comes back, he constructs a world in which even the reader is able to predict events, dialogue, and descriptions. Hemingway's technique is not obvious, and to see the technique one must closely analyze the actions of the characters that Hemingway designed, without chance, and at each level. After a thorough exploration of Hemingway's technique, the reason Hemingway creates this somewhat knowable world surfaces. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Hemingway presents war as a series of repeated actions from the first chapter. The most notable action is the march mentioned in the first paragraph, when the narrator, Frederick Henry, remembers that "the troops passed past the house and down the road." The parade of troops is so omnipresent that the narrator curiously refers to it twice in the following sentence: "We saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and the leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers march. » Hemingway's repeated mention of action reflects the repeated action of the soldiers, who do not stop even when the sun sets; as Henry notes: “Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching” (3). All of the marches mentioned above took place in late summer, but they continue into the fall when "the men, passing on the road, marched" (4). In the first two pages of the first chapter, the narrator mentions marching troops no less than five times, and in doing so, Hemingway allows the war to be defined by these traveling soldiers. Whenever Hemingway brings the reader closer to the war after this chapter, he always inserts the unnamed troops heading toward a generally unspecified endpoint. Due to how few actions the soldiers perform, the reader slowly comes to expect the soldiers to be walking whenever they are seen. While Hemingway allows his narrator, Henry, to refer to an aspect of the war apart from these marching soldiers in the first chapter, the "artillery flashes" in the distance, are nothing less than the soldiers and their constantly repeated personal actions, which give shape to the war in the chapter. The same goes for Hemingway in the rest of the novel, where everyone involved in the war ends up withan assigned task that he repeats over and over again. Frederick Henry is sent to drive his ambulance between the front and an ever-changing base. Before even packing his bags, upon returning from a long absence caused by an injury sustained at the front, Henry was told by his commander: “You can go and take charge of the Bainsizza’s four cars”. (165).Rinaldi, Henry's friend who operates on the wounded soldiers Henry delivers, complains: “I operated all summer and all fall. I work all the time. . .I never think. No, by God, I don't think so; I operate” (167). Hemingway's behavior, more subtly, is immediately linked to these war tasks, which are also repeated. The meals that men take on the road are inevitably of two kinds. The spaghetti in the "spaghetti pool" at the end of the book (191) is likely eaten in the same methodical manner as in the early moments of the book, where Henry explains that the only variation was in the way the men ate the spaghetti . , some "lift the spaghetti with the fork until the loose strands hang then lower it into the mouth, or use a continuous life and suck it into the mouth" (7). When men don't eat spaghetti, they invariably eat bread and cheese; plus, both meals are accompanied by red wine. Only once does Hemingway allow his characters to eat anything other than spaghetti or bread and cheese: when Henry and his men are stuck on a small farm, Piani finds a "long sausage" and eats it (217). Even considering this lack of variety, at some point the element of taste is the element that allows soldiers to differentiate between different actions in war. Even nominally different actions, advances and retreats become the same, except for the type of wine drunk. During one retreat, an ambulance driver accompanying Henry says, "I'd rather retreat than advance." On a retreat we drink barbera” (191). Hemingway constructs a world in which only the type of alcohol consumed allows soldiers to differentiate between the two distinct maneuvers. But Hemingway extends the effect of the repetitive nature of war beyond behaviors directly related to war. Henry and the other characters all adopt patterns of behavior that become frequent, as one might expect. The two most common actions are the drinking that happens every time someone has a free moment and the diary that Henry does it every time he is alone. When Henry is injured, the priest at Henry's base brings him three gifts. It is not surprising that two of them are “a bottle of vermouth” and “some English papers” (69). When Rinaldi visited Henry earlier that day, his gift was a “bottle of brandy” (63). Even once Henry arrives at the hospital in Milan after his forehead injury, Hemingway forces the behavior of Henry and Katherine Barkley, his future-wife, into regularly repeated patterns. After Henry describes a few representative days, mentioning the carriage rides, the meals at Gran Italia, the return to the hospital, and the date nights, Henry says quietly, "The summer went like this." (117). At this point in the novel, Hemingway can give us a sequence of a pattern and we don't need to know more, we only need to know that it "happened that way." As more and more moments repeat themselves, Hemingway blurs the lines protecting the uniqueness of the moments. Unexpected acts are repeated almost verbatim. When he first arrives at the hospital in Milan, Henry finds himself looking out the window: "The swallows were circling around and I was looking at them[fly] above the roofs” (87). Katherine soon arrives, and when she does, Henry has little time to look out the window, but when he finds himself alone, he looks out the window and "watches the swallows over the roofs" (113). His lone swallow sighting is one of the few diversions from Henry's constant paper reading, but Hemingway makes even this oddly specific diversion a repetitive action. Hemingway places another unexpected repeated action in chapter 23. The night before Henry returns to the front after his wound leave, he and Katherine head to a hotel in Milan. Along the way, they see another couple in an alley, where the soldier “was standing with his daughter in the shade of one of the stone buttresses in front of [Henry and Catherine]. They stood pressed against the stone, and he had put his cloak around her” (147). While Henry responds to the couple by saying, "They're like us," Katherine quickly responds by saying, "Nobody's like us," trying to assert the uniqueness of their union. Moments later, however, the two find themselves standing "in the street, against a high wall", Henry tells us how Katherine "put my cloak around her, so that it covered us both" ( 150). This strange repetition seems to be complemented by a certain capacity for action on the part of the characters, but the fact that this overt recurrence of a specific event is not recognized by Hemingway underlines the expected nature of such a repetition. Hemingway mixes this repetition with a strange derivative of repetition. , foreshadowing. Imagined moments are reproduced in the reality of the book with little action from the characters. Shortly after meeting Katherine in a small Italian town, Henry dreams of the couple having a more romantic and private date. The imagined event has some salient features: in the dream they meet in Milan and go to a hotel where they are taken to their room in the "elevator and it went up very slowly clicking through all the floors then to our floor. » Once in the room, they drink wine brought by room service (39). Oddly, when Henry is wounded in the front, he is transported to a hospital in Milan, the same hospital where Katherine was transferred. At the end of Henry's stay in Milan, the two will spend a night in a hotel. They take the elevator up to their room and “the elevator passes three floors with a click each time.” Once in the room, they order dinner and wine from Saint-Estèphe (151-153). After all the repetition in the book, the world seems to become a somewhat knowable place; if essential actions are repeated, it follows that there is a better chance of guessing future actions. This suspicion that the world Hemingway created is somehow knowable and confirmed through the moments of foreshadowing just mentioned and others, less explicit. After being injured, but before meeting Katherine, Henry talks about the feasibility of facial hair and one of the police officers asks him, "Why don't you have a beard?" (77). While this remark is made in passing and would be impossible as a soldier, once he escapes from the army, Catherine independently asks Henry, "Honey, would you like to grow a beard?" (298), a plea with which Henry complies. As Katherine is in labor, Henry has a strange vision of what will soon happen when he asks himself, "What if she were to die?" » (321). Henry has no reason to think that Katherine should die, there was a small complication when Henry asked that question, and as he recalls, "people don't die in childbirth these days" (320). However, even knowing.