Question

Identify parallelism in the short story "In Another Country" by citing textual evidence. How does the use of parallelism affect the story?

Answer 1

The excerpt that shows the low self-esteem of the soldiers and their belief that being a soldier has nothing to do with bravery from Ernest Hemingway's "In Another Country," is the sentence “ The three with the medals were like hunting-hawks; and I was not a hawk, although I might seem a hawk to those who had never hunted; they, the three, knew better and so we drifted apart.”

Answer 2

Here are some examples from Hemingway’s "In Another Country" that demonstrate parallelism:

The hospital was very old and very beautiful.

In this first example, the word very before the word old and again before the word beautiful helps maintain the balance of the sentence.

The girls at the Cova were very patriotic, and I found that the most patriotic people in Italy were the café girls—and I believe they are still patriotic.

The word patriotism is repeated three times in this example. Patriotism is one of the important themes of the story.

The three with the medals were like hunting-hawks; and I was not a hawk, although I might seem a hawk to those who had never hunted.

Finally, the word hawk is repeated three times to emphasize how different the speaker was from the other boys. This repetition emphasizes the alienation that the speaker felt in Milan.