RRhetoric
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Syntax & Word Order

Parataxis

pair-uh-TAK-sis / ˌpærəˈtæksɪs

Clauses set side by side with no subordinating words — no because, although, or which. Everything sits on one level, so the reader supplies the connections the grammar leaves out. Typical of Hemingway and the King James Bible.

"The sun rose. He walked to the window. The street was empty."

Don't confuse it with Asyndeton. Hypotaxis is its opposite: clauses nested by subordination. Asyndeton concerns missing conjunctions; parataxis concerns missing *hierarchy*.

Drill this device — 37 excerpts

In the Reader — 37 excerpts

Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed Into different bodies. I summon the supernatural beings who first contrived
— Ovid, Metamorphoses (translated by A.D. Melville) · open the passage →
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
— William Shakespeare, King Lear · open the passage →
Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads · open the passage →
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale · open the passage →
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass · open the passage →
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment · open the passage →
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch · open the passage →
Winterbourne was almost grateful for having found the formula that applied to Miss Daisy Miller. She was a flirt—a pretty American flirt. He had never, as yet, had any relations with young ladies of this category.
— Henry James, Daisy Miller · open the passage →
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · open the passage →
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia · open the passage →
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate!
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper · open the passage →
A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil's Row who were circling madly about the heap and pelting at him.
— Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets · open the passage →
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors.
— Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage · open the passage →
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
— James Joyce, Dubliners · open the passage →
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man · open the passage →
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
— William Butler Yeats, The Dial · open the passage →
before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster,
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby · open the passage →
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway · open the passage →
out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway · open the passage →
The bull was squared on all four feet to be killed, and Romero killed directly below us. He killed not as he had been forced to by the last bull, but as he wanted to. He profiled directly in front of the bull, drew the sword out of the folds of the muleta and sighted along the blade.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises · open the passage →
That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees —Those dying generations—at their song
— William Butler Yeats, The Tower · open the passage →
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree.
— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury · open the passage →
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence.
— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury · open the passage →
moved, ants and ant lions to set traps for them, grasshoppers to jump into the air and flick their yellow wings for a second, sow bugs like little armadillos, plodding
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath · open the passage →

…and 13 more. Meet the rest in the quiz →

Travels with

Devices that share a passage with parataxis most often — company reveals character.

Anaphora 19 Personification 14 Passive Voice 13 Litotes 12 Metaphor 11 Irony 11 Metonymy 10 Apposition / Appositive 10

The rest of the family

Hyperbaton Anastrophe Periodic Sentence Cumulative (Loose) Sentence Parenthesis Apposition / Appositive Zeugma Hendiadys Pleonasm Enumeration / Accumulatio Passive Voice Cleft Sentence