Parallelism

Every day, the sun rises. Every 12 hours and twenty-five minutes, the tide goes out. Repetition is built into our experience of the world. We tend to like it, though too much can cause irritation.  It can be used on both the sentence and the very large macro level to engage the reader, inform them about the world without explanation and control their emotional response.

In Chapter 41 of Moby-Dick (as throughout the novel), Melville uses parallelism to create heightened attention in the reader: 

...all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.

In Gwendolyn Brooks's poem, "We Real Cool," it lulls the reader into a lyrical and indeed joyful self-satisfaction that mirrors the first-person plural narrator, then pulls out the rug with a devastating consequence.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

One of my favorite examples of extended parallelism in contemporary literature is the two-sentence opening of Rick Moody's novel Purple America, built around the repetition of the word whosoever: 

Whosoever knows the folds and complexities of his own mother’s body, he shall never die. Whosoever knows the latitudes of his mother’s body, whosoever has taken her into his arms and immersed her baptismally in the first-floor tub, lifting one of her alabaster legs and then the other over its lip, whosoever bathes her with Woolworth’s soaps in sample sizes, whosoever twists the creaky taps and tests the water on the inside of his wrist, whosoever shovels a couple of tablespoons of rose bath salts under the billowing faucet and marvels at their vermilion color, whosoever bends by hand her sclerotic limbs, as if reassuring himself about the condition of a hinge, whosoever has kissed his mother on the part that separates the lobes of her white hair and has cooed her name while soaping underneath the breast where he was once fed, whosoever breathes the acrid and dispiriting stench of his mother’s body while scrubbing the greater part of this smell away with Woolworth’s lavender soaps, who has pushed her discarded bra and oversized panties (scattered on the tile floor behind him) to one side, away from the water sloshing occasionally over the edge of the tub and choking the runoff drain, who has lost his footing on these panties, panties once dotted with blood of children unconceived, his siblings unconceived, panties now intended to fit over a vinyl undergarment, who has wiped stalactites of drool from his mother’s mouth with a moistened violet washcloth, who has swept back the annoying violet shower curtain the better to lift up his stick-figure mother and to bathe her ass, where a sweet and infantile shit sometimes collects, causing her both discomfort and shame, whosoever angrily manhandles the dial on the bathroom radio (balanced on the toilet tank) with one wet hand in an effort to find a college station that blasts only compact disc recordings of train accidents and large-scale construction operations (he should be over this noise by his age), whosoever selects at last the drummers of Burundi on WUCN knowing full well that his mother can brook only the music of the Tin Pan Alley period and certain classics, and whosoever has then reacted guiltily to his own selfishness and tuned to some lite AM station featuring the greatest hits of swing, whosoever will notice in the course of his mission the ripe light of early November as it is played out on the wall of the bathroom where one of those plug-in electric candles with plastic base is the only source of illumination, whosoever waits in this half-light while his mother takes her last bodily pleasure: the time in which her useless body floats in the warm, humid, even lapping of rose-scented bathwater, a water which in spite of its pleasures occasionally causes in his mother transient scotoma, ataxia, difficulty swallowing, deafness, and other temporary dysfunctions consistent with her ailment, whosoever looks nonetheless at his pacific mom’s face in that water and knows—in a New Age kind of way—the face he had before he was born, whosoever weeps over his mother’s condition while bathing her, silently weeps, without words or expressions of pity or any nose-blowing or honking while crying, just weeps for a second like a ninny, whosoever has thereafter recovered quickly and forcefully from despair, whosoever has formulated a simple gratitude for the fact that he still has a mother, but who has nonetheless wondered at the kind of astral justice that has immobilized her thus, whosoever has then wished that the bath was over already so that he could go and drink too much at a local bar, a bar where he will encounter the citizens of this his hometown, a bar where he will see his cronies from high school, those who never left, those who have stayed to become civic boosters, those who have sent kids to the same day school they themselves attended thirty years before, whosoever has looked at his watch and yawned, while wondering how long he has to let his mother soak, whosoever soaps his mother a second time, to be sure that every cranny is disinfected, that every particle of dirt, every speck of grime, is eliminated, whosoever steps into a draining tub to hoist his mother from it, as if he were hoisting a drenched parachute from a stream bed, whosoever has balanced her on the closed toilet seat so that he might dry her with a towel of decadent thickness (purple), whosoever has sniffed, lightly, undetectably, the surface of her skin as he dries her, whosoever has refused to put his mother’s spectacles on her face just now, as he has in the past when conscripted into bathing her, as he ought to do now, though in all likelihood she can only make out a few blurry shapes, anyway (at least until the cooling of her insulted central nervous system), whosoever wishes to prolong this additional disability, however, because when she is totally blind in addition to being damn near quadriplegic she faces up to the fact that her orienting skills are minimal, whosoever slips his mother’s panties up her legs and checks the dainty hairless passage into her vulva one more time, because he can’t resist the opportunity here for knowledge, whosoever gags briefly at his own forwardness, whosoever straps his mother’s bra onto her, though the value of a bra for her is negligible, whosoever slips a housedress over her head, getting first one arm and then the other tangled in the neck hole, whosoever reaches for and then pulls the plug on the radio because the song playing on it is too sad, some terribly sad jazz ballad with muted trumpet, whosoever puts slippers on his mother’s feet, left and then right, fiddling with her toes briefly first, simply to see if there is any sensation there, because her wasting disease is characterized by periods in which some feeling or sensation suddenly returns to affected extremities (though never all sensation), and likewise periods in which sensation is precipitously snuffed out, whosoever notes the complete lack of response in his mother when he pinches her big toe, and whosoever notes this response calmly, whosoever now finally sets his mother’s glasses on her nose and adjusts the stems to make sure they are settled comfortably on her ears, whosoever kisses his mother a second time where her disordered hair is thinnest and takes her now fully into his arms to carry her to the wheelchair in the doorway, whosoever says to his wasting mom while stuttering mildly out of generalized anxiety and because of insufficient pause for the inflow and outflow of breath, Hey, Mom, you look p-p-p-p-p-pretty fabulous t-t-tonight, you look like a million b-b-bucks, whosoever says this while unlocking the brake on the chair, whosoever then brings the chair to a stop in the corridor off the kitchen, beneath a cheap, imitation American Impressionist landscape that hangs in that hallway, just so that he can hug his mom one more time because he hasn’t seen her in months, because he is a neglectful son, because her condition is worse, always worse, whosoever fantasizes nonetheless about lashing her chair to a television table on casters so that he can just roll her and the idiot box with its barbiturate programming around the house without having to talk to her because he’s been watching this decline for two decades or more and he’s fed up with comforting and self-sacrifice, the very ideas make him sick, whosoever settles her in the kitchen by the Formica table and opens the refrigerator looking for some mush that will do the job for this evening, some mush that he can push down her throat and on which she will not spend the whole night choking as she sometimes does, so that he will have to use that little medical vacuum cleaner thing, that dental tool, to remove saliva and food particles from her gullet, tiny degraded hunks of minestrone and baby food, whosoever trips briefly over his mother’s chair trying to get around it on the way to the chocolate milk in the fridge and jams his toe, shit, shit, shit, sorry, Ma, whosoever then changes his mind and fetches out a six-pack of the finest imported beer that he brought himself from a convenience store in town, and pops open one can for himself and one for his mother, whosoever then dips into his mother’s beer a weaving and trembling plastic straw, whosoever then carries this beverage to his mother and fits the end of the straw between his mother’s lips, exhorting her to drink, drink, whosoever then tilts back his own head emptying a fine imported beer in a pair of swallows so that he might move on to the next, whosoever then hugs his mom (again) feeling, in the flush of processed barley and hops, that his life is withal the best of lives, full of threat and bounty, bad news and good, affluence and penury, the sacred and the profane, the masculine and the feminine, the present and the repetitions of the past, whosoever in this instant of sorrow and reverence, knows the answers to why roses bloom, why wineglasses sing, why human lips, when kissed, are so soft, and why parents suffer, he shall never die.

These three examples each use just a single word to govern their parallel structures.  It could also be a longer phrase.  Parallelism is close kin, on the level of syllable, to alliteration and assonance and on the symbolic level to the use of motifs. It's a great tool for creating meaning through comparison, rather than explanation, which is to say it can help make a work more subtle.

PROMPT: Do think about larger parallels in your work and consider fostering and expanding them, but for this short prompt, go to a scene or moment of great importance in your text.  Somewhere in this scene, create a moment with strong parallelism. Inject a parallel structure, repeating a word, phrase or structure several times (there are 5  all's is the passage from Moby-Dick, eight We's in the Brooks).  Parallel structures add a sense of the importance of a passage, heighten drama or create suspense around something you want your readers to be curious about. The key is to repeat your element (word or phrase) in a mantra-like way, adding perhaps a small variation to some iterations. This is a poetic device, so read your work aloud here, going above all for an entrancing sound.  Parallelism draws the reader's attention. With it, you deliver not more information but more urgency.  It's a powerful tool.