Chapter 21 repeat

In autumn, the battle always goes on.But we didn't participate again.Autumn in Milan is very cold and it gets dark early.Once the lights are turned on after dark, it is a pleasure to walk the street and look at the windows.Game hung outside the store, including foxes, wild deer, and small birds.The fox's fur was covered with snow, like a layer of flour, and its tail was blown back and forth by the wind.Wild deer are stiff and hard, heavy and empty.The bird's feathers curled when the wind blows.It was a cold autumn day, and the wind was blowing off the top of the mountain. We are in the hospital every afternoon.There was more than one route through the city to the hospital at dusk. There were two routes along the canal, but they were far away.To get to the hospital, you have to cross a bridge over the canal.There are three bridges to choose from.On one of them was a woman selling roasted nuts.Every time I pass by, I always feel warm when I stand in front of her charcoal fire stall, and the nuts are still warm after I put them in my pocket.The hospital is old and beautiful, enter the gate through the courtyard, and there is another door on the opposite side to go out.The courtyard is also often where funerals begin.Opposite the hospital are some newly built brick pavilions, where we meet every afternoon, everyone is polite and interested in the things around us, and then get into the car, different cars have different places to go.

Ernest Hemingway, In Another Country (1927) If you have time and interest, you might as well take a few colored pens and circle the words that appear more than twice in the first paragraph of Hemingway's novel, each word has the same color, and then summarize them.As a result, you will see a complex picture of two types of words: one type refers to words, also known as content words: autumn, cold, black, wind, blowing; the other type is articles, prepositions and conjunctions , Also known as function words: the, of, in, and, etc. It is impossible not to repeat the use of function words in writing, so we are usually used to it.But in this small paragraph, the frequency of "and" is striking.This feature shows the repetitive feature of its syntax, that is, multiple declarative sentences are connected together, rather than linked together by the main-slave compound sentence.The repetition distribution of content words is not uniform, only concentrated at the beginning and the end.

The repetition rate of content words and function words is so high, for example, as a student at school, you have to fail in the "composition"; and the teacher's approach is reasonable, because the traditional beautiful essay requires "beautiful transformation": it is inevitable to repeat the "composition". When you come to a certain thing, you should try to change the way of saying it; the sentence structure should also be varied and colorful. (The rich and varied work of Henry James, discussed in Section VI, is a good example of this.) However, Hemingway's rejection of this traditional rhetorical method is partly literary and partly philosophical.He believes that "beautiful composition" obliterates the authenticity of experience, so he insists on using simple and unpretentious language "to truly record what you did, what the actual situation was, and the emotional experience that resulted from it."

This may seem simple, but it is not.Words are simple words, but their arrangement is not simple.For example, the first sentence in this excerpt can be arranged in many ways, but Hemingway chose these two ways to separate "participating in war", suggesting the narrator's indescribable nervousness, in which there is both relief and There is irony again.Because we will soon learn that he and his companions were wounded Italian soldiers in the First World War. At this time, they are recuperating from their wounds, but they have realized that the war that almost killed them may make their lives meaningless.This is a story about trauma, in which some people overcome trauma, and others are defeated by trauma.An unspoken but crucial word in the text is "death".

American Saying for Autumn The word "fall" evokes both the withering of plants and the traditional word for death, "to fall."In the second sentence, the word is used together with "cold" and "black", which further deepens this association.The brightly lit shop seems to distract one's attention slightly (enhanced by the fact that none of the substantive words are repeated), but the narrator quickly focuses on the game hanging outside the shop.Game further symbolizes death.The following descriptions, such as snow sprinkled on fur, wind ruffled feathers, etc., are real and specific, which deepen the association of words such as "falling, cold, black, wind, blowing".The three words repeated in the last sentence are used together for the first time, making the ending somewhat poetic: "It was a cold autumn day, and the wind blew off the top of the mountain." The mountain is where the battle is going on.Wind is often a symbol of life and spirit in religious and romantic literature, but here it is reminiscent of the annihilation of life.In these early novels by Hemingway, God is dead, and the heroes, drawn from the trauma of war, become neither rhetorical nor metaphysical.He trusts only his own feelings, viewing his experience in starkly polarized terms: cold/warm, light/dark, life/death.

That charismatic rhythm and repetition remains in the second verse. The word "hospital" can easily find many beautiful substitutes, and occasionally it can be replaced by the impersonal pronoun "it"; but the hospital is the center of life of the wounded, a place of daily pilgrimage, in which are their hopes and fears , so the repetition of the word appears persuasive.There is more than one way to go to the hospital, but the end point is always the same.There are several bridges to choose from, but crossing the canal is inevitable (perhaps this is an allusion to the Styx of another world).The narrator loves to walk the bridge where he can buy roasted nuts, warm in his pocket.Like the hope of life—Hemingway did not use this metaphor, but implied; just like the first paragraph, he did not have a metaphor, and he was still able to describe the season at that time vividly and touchingly, no less than any emotion used Misplacement works with this technique.The line between simplistic and idiosyncratic simplification is not very clear, but Hemingway did not always stick to a simplistic style, but from his early work he refined a style that was entirely unique.

Needless to say, repetition does not necessarily mean reproducing life in the pale positivist's anti-metaphysical way, as in Hemingway; Approach—such as D·H·Lawrence.The language of the first chapter of the book not only evokes nostalgia for the lost pastoral life, but also reminds people of the repeated verbs and the neat arrangement of parallel sentences in the Old Testament: The tender wheat seedlings are swaying and soft, and when people come to inspect them, their luster is reflected along the limbs of people.They hold the udder of the cow, and the cow produces milk, which pulsates in the human hand, and the pulse in the veins in the teat of the cow beats to the pulse in the human hand.

Repetition is still a common technique used by orators and preachers. Charles Dickens often imitates the speeches of these characters in the tone of the characters in his works.For example, a chapter in Bleak House devoted to the death of the impoverished street sweeper Joe ends thus: dead, my lord.Dead, gentlemen.Dead, bishops and priests.Died, men and women born with divine compassion in their hearts.Death is all around us every day. Of course, repetition can also have comic effect, as in this excerpt from Martin Amis: Funny enough, the only way I could make Selina really want to sleep with me was by not wanting to sleep with her.This method is very effective.It can get her into that mood.The trouble is, when I don't want to sleep with her (and sometimes I do), I just don't want to sleep with her.When will this happen?When would I not want to sleep with her?When she wants to sleep with me.The time I want to sleep with her is when she least wants to sleep with me.She almost always genuinely wants to sleep with me when I yell at her, threaten her, or give her enough money.

The phrase "sleeping with" is repeated over and over again, and there are many variations to choose from (if you don't believe me, you might as well rewrite this paragraph with elegant transformations).This repetition makes the narrator's tension and ambivalence during the sexual relationship with Selina more comic and ironic.The last sentence exemplifies another important type of repetition: the repetition of a thematic keyword throughout the book—“money.”The word that occupies the crucial last position in the citation is not "sleep" but "money."So a repetition that belongs to the macro level of the text acts as a transformative device on the micro level.