In his novel A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway uses parataxis extensively. With this structure he avoids creating causal connections in his narrative, which is one of the most famous aspects of Hemingway's writing. But the unpredictability suggested by the anti-causal nature of the narrative is counterbalanced by another, less obvious narrative tool of the author. The unpredictability is contrasted by the extensive repetition Hemingway employs in the novel, repetition which ultimately reveals a somewhat knowable world. The central event of the novel is war, and Hemingway constructs war to be defined by repeated actions. Just as he constructs the entire war to be composed of a couple of moves, repeated endlessly, Hemingway also designs the narrative to be defined by recurring events. This begins with the characters' actions as they correspond to war, a war that forces them to repeatedly perform the same social behavior. Hemingway extends this repetition so that it soon invisibly and silently pervades all of the characters' behaviors, even small and private ones. In the end, we see that the words of the novel also return frequently. As Hemingway builds this world in which everything returns, he builds a world in which the reader is also able to predict events, dialogues and descriptions. Hemingway's technique is not obvious and to see it it is necessary to closely analyze the actions of the characters that Hemingway drew, without randomness and at every level. After an in-depth exploration of Hemingway's technique, the reason why Hemingway creates this somewhat knowable world emerges. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayHemingway presents war as a series of actions repeated from the first chapter. The most obvious action is the march mentioned in the first paragraph, when the narrator, Frederick Henry, recalls that "the troops passed the house and along the road." The march of the troops is so omnipresent that the narrator strangely refers to it twice in the next sentence: "We saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and the leaves, moved 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 stop even when the sun sets; as Henry notes, “Sometimes in the darkness, we heard the troops marching” (3). All of the marches mentioned above occurred in the late summer, but continued into the fall when “the men, passing along the road, marched” (4). In the two pages of the first chapter, the narrator mentions the marching troops five times, and in doing so Hemingway allows the war to be defined by these peripatetic soldiers. Whenever Hemingway introduces the reader to the war after this chapter, he always inserts anonymous troops heading towards a usually unspecified end point. Because of the few actions the soldiers complete, the reader slowly comes to expect the soldiers to march whenever they are seen. While Hemingway allows his narrator, Henry, to reference an aspect of the war outside of these marching soldiers in the film. The first chapter, the “artillery flashes” in the distance, is none other than the soldiers, and their endlessly repeated personal actions, shaping the war in the chapter. So Hemingway does in the rest of the novel, where each person involved in the war finds himself with an assigned task that he repeats endlessly. Frederick Henry is sent to drive his ambulance back and forth between the front lines and an ever-changing base. Before even posingthe suitcases, upon returning from a long holiday caused by an injury sustained to the front, Henry hears his commander say: "You can go and take delivery of the four Bainsizza cars". (165).Rinaldi, Henry's friend who operates on the wounded soldiers that Henry delivers, laments that “I operated all summer and all autumn. I work all the time. . .I never think. No, by God, I don't think so; I work” (167). Hemingway's behavior, more subtly, is immediately related to these wartime tasks, which also repeat. The meals that men consume during the journey are unavoidable of two kinds. The spaghetti in the “spaghetti bowl” at the end of the book (191), is probably eaten in the same methodical way 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 “ lifting the spaghetti onto the fork until the loose strands hung free then lowering it into the mouth, or using a continuous waist and sucking into the mouth” (7). When men don't eat spaghetti they invariably eat bread and cheese; furthermore both meals are consumed with red wine. Only once does Hemingway allow his characters to eat something besides spaghetti or bread and cheese: when Henry and his men are stranded on a small farm, Piani finds a “long sausage” and eats it (217). Even considering this lack of variety, at a certain point the gustatory element is the element that allows soldiers to distinguish between the various actions of war. Even nominally different actions, advances, and retreats become the same, except for the type of wine being drunk. During a retreat, the ambulance driver accompanying Henry says, “I prefer a retreat to an advance. In retreat we drink Barbera” (191). Hemingway constructs a world in which only the type of alcohol consumed allows soldiers to distinguish between the two distinct maneuvers. But Hemingway extends the effect of the repetitive nature of war beyond behavior directly related to war. Henry and the other characters all follow patterns of behavior that become predictably frequent. The two most ubiquitous actions are drinking alcohol whenever someone has a free moment and the newspaper saying Henry does it whenever he is alone. When Henry is injured, the priest from Henry's base brings him three gifts. Not surprisingly, two are “a bottle of vermouth” and “English papers” (69). When Rinaldi visited Henry that day, his gift was a “bottle of cognac” (63). Even once Henry reaches the hospital in Milan after his injury at the front, Hemingway forces the behavior of both Henry and Katherine Barkley, his soon-to-be wife, into regularly repeated patterns. After Henry describes a few representative days, mentioning carriage rides, eating at Gran Italia, returning to the hospital, and late-night appointments, Henry calmly says, "The summer went on that way" (117). At this point in the novel, Hemingway can give us a sequence of a pattern and we don't need to know anything else, we just need to know that "it went on that way." As more and more moments repeat themselves, Hemingway blurs the lines, protecting the uniqueness of the moments. We see that unexpected acts are repeated almost verbatim. When he first arrives at the hospital in Milan, Henry finds himself looking out the window: “The swallows circled around and I watched them [fly] over the roofs” (87). Katherine arrives early, and when she does Henry has little time to look out the window, but when he is left alone, he looks out the window and "watches the swallows on the roofs" (113). The solitary observation of swallows is one of the few diversions from the constant reading of newspapers byHenry, but Hemingway makes even this strangely specific diversion a repetitive action. Hemingway places another unexpected repeated action in chapter 23. The night before Henry returns to the front after his injured leave, he and Katherine are heading to a hotel in Milan. Along the way, they see another couple in an alley, where the soldier was “standing with his girlfriend in the shade of one of the stone buttresses in front of [Henry and Catherine]. They were pressed against the stone, and he had put the cloak on her” (147). While Henry responds to the couple by saying, "They're like us," Katherine quickly responds by saying, "No one'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 telling us how Katherine “wrapped herself in my cloak, so it covered us both” (150). This strange repetition seems to be completed with some action on the part of the characters, but the fact that this obvious recurrence of a specific event is not acknowledged by Hemingway highlights the expectation of such repetition. Hemingway mixes this repetition with a strange derivative of repetition, foreshadowing. The imagined moments recur in the reality of the book with little action from the characters. Soon after meeting Katherine in a small Italian town, Henry dreams of the couple having a more romantic and private encounter. 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 “with the elevator and it would go up very slowly clicking on all the floors and then on our floor. " Once in the room, they drink the wine brought by room service (39). Strangely, when Henry is injured at the front, he is taken to a hospital in Milan, the same hospital where Katherine appears to have been transferred. At the end of their stay of Henry in Milan, the two go to the hotel for a night. They go to their room with the elevator and "the elevator went up three floors with a click every time, they order dinner and wine St . Estephe (151-153). After all the repetitions of the book, the world seems to become a somewhat knowable place; if essential actions are repeated, it follows that there is a greater chance of guessing future actions world created by Hemingway is somehow knowable and confirmed through the moments of foreshadowing just mentioned and other, less explicit ones. After being wounded, but before meeting Katherine, Henry talks about the feasibility of facial hair and one of the agents asks him: “Why don't you raise your beard?” (77). Although this observation is made in passing and would be impossible as a soldier, once she escapes the army, Catherine independently asks Henry, "Darling, would you like to grow a beard?" (298), a plea which Henry complies with. While Katherine is giving birth, Henry strangely sees what will soon happen when he wonders, "What if she were to die?" (321). Henry has no reason to think that Katherine should die, there was a little complication when Henry asked this question, and as he reminds himself, "People don't die in childbirth nowadays" (320). Yet, even with this knowledge, he is unable to erase the belief that she will die. Ultimately, he dies, and it is due to unexpected hemorrhaging resulting from complications that arise only after Henry becomes convinced that he will die. The entire relationship between Henry and Katherine is essentially predicted before there is any reason to even predict. Immediately after their meeting, moments after Katherine slaps Henry for trying to get the first kiss, Katherine half-jokingly says, “You'll be good to me, won't you? . . . because we will have a.